Interview with Michael R. Moloney, October 2, 2003

MOYEN: All right, I'm here today with former senator Michael Moloney, Mike Moloney, here at his law office in Lexington, Kentucky. Thank you for meeting with me.

MOLONEY: Thank you for asking me to meet with you.

MOYEN: Now, you served in the 13th district--

MOLONEY: From the 13th--

MOYEN: From the 13th district in the Senate for twenty-four years.

MOLONEY: Twenty-five. Just a little short of twenty-five. I was elected in November of 1971, took office in '72, and remained there until I resigned in July of 1996 when I moved out of the district.

MOYEN: Okay. Could you tell me a little bit about your family background? I mean how far back to you go, back to your family, and how 00:01:00long have they lived here in Lexington?

MOLONEY: Well, the first members of the Moloney family to come to America came over here in about 1850 from Ireland. They came into the port of Philadelphia, and then from Philadelphia they came down the river to Pittsburgh, and then, or came down to Pittsburgh, and then on down the river to Cincinnati; then they worked on the railroad, coming down to Lexington; got off and started a business here. My great- great-uncle and his brother started a merchant store, little knick knacks and things, over what was then the corner of Third and Deweese. And in fact, we still have, I have the bill book from that store, which shows purchases and what he would be buying, what he would be 00:02:00selling through the 1860s. It's in their own hand-writing, and so they were merchants, so to speak, and then my grandfather was a policeman. Walked the beat in the north end of town, and then my father was an attorney. Actually, my father's history is far more interesting than mine. He, he never graduated from high school; he quit high school and joined the Navy when he was fifteen in the First World War, and--

MOYEN: What high school did he quit? Do you--

MOLONEY: Well, he went to what was then known as University High.

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: And he quit high school and joined the Navy, and he came back, and went back to high school. And did not graduate because he could not pass geometry, he just didn't have that kind of mind, brilliant 00:03:00mind, but not that kind, and the university had let him enroll as a special student, being a veteran, with the understanding that he could not graduate from the university until he had passed high school geometry. He tutored, he hired a tutor to teach him high school geometry, and the tutor failed him. So after two years of college, he applied for the enrollment, or for admission in law school, and was admitted with the understanding that he could not get a law degree until he had passed high school geometry. Well after two years of law school, he took the bar exam and passed it. In the meantime he worked his way through school working in a drugstore over in Paris, he'd drive from Lexington to Paris to work in a drugstore, he had passed as a 00:04:00pharmacist, he took the board of pharmacy exam and passed it. So he was a registered pharmacist and an attorney, however didn't have a high school degree (laughs).

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: The only degree he ever got was an honorary degree from the University of Louisville many years later after working in the legislature for a number of years. He was, he ran for the House of Representatives in 1927 and lost.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: He then held a number of appointed political offices, basically probate commissioner, which was probably the best political, appointed political office to have in the judicial system then because your salary was based on the size of the estates that were occurring, commissioned office. He served there, and then in 1943 he ran against an incumbent for the state Senate, the same district that I, same numbered district that I ultimately represented. And he won there and 00:05:00served three terms in the Senate; he was elected majority leader during his first term and served as majority leader for ten years. He left the legislature for health reasons and for other reasons, financial primarily, he was trying to build a law practice up in '55. Let's see, '4--, yeah, '55, after, he did not run again in '55. And came back in '59 and ran for the House from the old district that's the center of the Lexington district, was elected to three terms there, and served as majority leader, in one of those terms, was elected to serve majority leader in the second term, but died right before, right before the election, well right after the election, right before he began to take office. So, you know, I was raised in a family that was very involved in politics. I can remember when I was a child, front doorbell would 00:06:00ring, I'd answer it, and there would be the governor come to talk to dad, that was very, very influential. He knew the legislature and he, advisor to the governors he served under, particularly governor Weatherby, and Governor, Governor Clements, and then Governor Weatherby, he was very close with them. And he was, he was thought of very highly by a lot of people.

MOYEN: Um-hm. The, John Ed Pearce's book, I believe the quote was, "it is likely that no man in the history of the state was ever more loved by legislators, politicians, lobbyists, and the press, than Dick Moloney." So--

MOLONEY: I think that's a fair statement. He, he could, you know, I think, as for Ed Peirce's book, he would talk about the lobbyists, particularly lobbyists in the area of mental health. The man politically wrote the mental health laws in the state of Kentucky 00:07:00to get rid of this concept where we housed people, and then we then started treating them. The community mental health program was, was his program, and the people who, Cornelia Chappell(??) and some others, who were very prominent in that area, they, you know, they lobbied that, and they lobbied, and at the same time, he could be as tough as he could be on, on lobbyists that he felt were trying to do something that they ought not be doing. There's a lot of good stories on that, I probably couldn't put it on tape because it'd burn the tape out (both laugh). But I had the opportunity in my--his last couple years of life to be with him a lot. He had a series of heart attacks, and was not comfortable driving a car, so I would drive him, and had a great opportunity to talk about a lot of things then.

MOYEN: Let me ask you this, with his political alignment in the Democratic Party, what kind of things would your dad say about "Happy" Chandler?

MOLONEY: They weren't very close.

MOYEN: Right.

MOLONEY: (Laughs), he, you know, came out of the, the way, the Clements, the Weatherby, the Combs faction of the Democratic Party. Although when Combs and Wyatt were both running for governor, before they teamed up, he was for Wyatt, which kind of irritated congress. It didn't kind of irritate congress, it made 'em real mad, and it really made Clements mad. Daddy really, well actually, he, Clements got mad at daddy in 1960 when dad was one of three delegates from Kentucky to vote for John Kennedy at the convention. The rest of the delegation was for Johnson, because Clements, obviously, was so close to Johnson, which has some more irony in it, because later, after I finished law school and finished the Army, I went to Washington, and I worked at the Democratic National Committee when Johnson was president (laughs). So it was, there was some irony there.

MOYEN: Uh-huh. Is there, or can you think of any stories that you could tell about those--anything that really sticks out in your mind?

MOLONEY: Well, I think a lot of it has to do with the times. When dad was majority leader of the Senate, I think give you some idea of what his involvement with Kentucky government was, and Democratic politics was. The mayor of Louisville died, and ----------(??) to select a replacement mayor, Governor Clements called my father from Lexington, from Frankfort, my father was in Lexington, had him go to Louisville and negotiate on behalf of the governor as to who the new mayor of Louisville was going to be . And it was Charlie Farnsley who ended up being a very, very popular mayor in Louisville. But I mean can you imagine today a politician from Lexington being asked to go to Louisville to help them select, the Democrats there solve internal problems. No. No way would it happen. That's how times are so much 00:10:00different.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: And you know I just, dad, dad was just a, he knew government, and he knew how to make the legislature work, he knew the quirks of it, and when I, we would go down on Sundays, every Sunday he would meet with eight or nine of the regular people that he worked on a day to day basis with in politics, and as I got older, I could kind of sit in and listen, sit in the back of the room and just listen. I thought, one of the stories I remember, and this was, this happened when he was back in the House, and Governor Combs was governor, and dad was the caucus chairman then, he was not majority leader yet. Combs did not feel comfortable with him being majority leader because he had been for Wyatt.

MOYEN: Right.

MOLONEY: And so dad was caucus chairman, and he would, however, go to 00:11:00a lot of leadership meetings in the governor's office. Now, he took me along, he said, "You can come in and sit in the back of the room." And they were talking about trying to pass this piece of legislation, and everybody said, "Well, governor, we can do this and we can do this, and we can do this, and we can get this passed," and the governor went around the room, says, "Can we do it that way? Can we do it that way?" And everybody's agreeing, everybody agreed with the governor. He got to my father, and he says, "Governor, yes, we can do it that way," he said, "honorable men would not do it that way, but we can do it that way." And Combs said, "Senator, there you go again" (both laugh). He was in the House but they still called him Senator, but ----------(??) in a different way as I recall, but that was, that was one of the things. And one of the old memories I had was when Wyatt, Governor Wyatt, or Lieutenant Governor Wyatt, was running for the Senate, against, I suspect it would have been Thruston Morton, I'm not 00:12:00sure, either Morton or Cooper, it would be Morton. And ----------(??) had been down there at the Freedom Hall, and President Truman, or former president at that time, was the featured speaker, and Freedom Hall, on the floor of Freedom Hall was full, I mean, the total, every single table was filled up, and Shelby Kinkead who was then the state senator from the 13th District, protege of my father's, was the campaign manager for Governor Wyatt, for the Senate, and dad and Mr. Shelby Kinkead and myself, and a gentleman from Louisville by the name of Bob Evans, M.R. Bob Evans, if you go back through Louisville politics you'll find his name, went to the airport to greet, to pick up President Truman. Bob Evans was the sergeant in Truman's artillery 00:13:00unit in the First World War, and so we got, the president got off the plane, and we went to his, I don't remember where it was, I remember the configuration, ----------(??) a little garden apartment where he was, kind of going to be where he was going to wait until it was time to go over to Freedom Hall and give his speech. And we're sitting here in this little garden apartment, and dad and I were sitting back in the corner just kind of observing, and everybody was talking to President Truman, and he stopped and he said, "Sergeant?" to Bob Evans, he says, "I've been sitting in this apartment about a half hour," he says, "where is this Kentucky Bourbon that you all are proud of?" (both laugh). And he poured himself a big drink, and ----------(??) to Louisville and made a great speech then (both laugh), made a great speech. But those are the kind of memories I have, and they're fond ones, they're fond ones. The tough ones have to do with, you know, I was driving my own car on December 23rd and my father drops dead next 00:14:00to me, that was not a, that's not a good memory. But we, I'd gotten pretty close to him that last couple of years, after I came back to law school, was here a lot, was away in college and so I didn't have the opportunity to be with him a lot then.

MOYEN: ----------(??) generally, I mean just in American history, and--

MOLONEY: Oh, yeah. ----------(??) and one day after president Kennedy was killed.

MOYEN: So, let me ask you this, how would you describe your political philosophy, and how your father influenced that?

MOLONEY: I would describe my political phil--, I mean, I, unabashed liberal, and I have no bones about it. Probably even more liberal than the New Deal liberals as far as where we've come socially today, and I think, while I remember having philosophical discussions with my father 00:15:00about what was going to be done and why, the actions he took were such that I saw, I think a lot of the things I believed in he believed in. I can recall, I was, when he was, I'm trying to think, this had to be when he was state senator, no, probably back when he, no, he would have been senator, and he, we still had a good bit of strong patronage in Kentucky, particularly in the highway department, it's still there now but it's not as pronounced as it was then, and if you wanted a job in the highway department you had in Fayette County, Dick Moloney had to recommend you. I mean, we're talking about the road crews, I'm talking about professional people, I'm talking about the road crew. But if you wanted a job in the highway department, Dick Moloney had to recommend you, and then you could go through the system. The road crew finally retired, and there were two people up for the job, and one was a guy 00:16:00who had been deputy foreman and the other was a fellow who worked on a road crew who happened to be black, and they had a white road crew and a black road crew. And my father said that the black man was going to be voted for foreman, he was going to be the foreman in Fayette County, and the other fellow said, "Well if that beep(??) is going to be for road crew foreman, I quit." And dad said, "Fine, you're gone." And he was gone, and Clifford Beatty became a road crew foreman. His grandson is chief of police in Lexington right now, Anthony Beatty. It's a family that, our two families have known each other, I can't remember when we didn't. But I mean that kind of thing was something that I saw, I saw dad do strongly. In his 1951 primary race against John Y. Brown Sr., tough race, toughest primary race he ever had. Wasn't his 00:17:00closest, but I mean it was rough. Congressman from Chicago, Dawson, who was real, real strong long serving congressman from inner-city Chicago, black man, came down and gave a hell of a speech for my father, over at the old little theatre, and dad won that election by virtue of the African American vote in Fayette County. He'd always had strong support there; I always had strong support there. The first time I ran, I went to see some of my father's friends in the profe--, black professional community, a lot of the insurance people, there were some dentists here and some others, and pharmacists, and I'll never forget Mr. Johnson(??) telling me, I, you know, "I don't know you, I knew your daddy, and that's good enough for me, I'll give you one chance, and if you do a good job, we'll give you some more." And I won the election in those precincts, I won a very close election, I think 00:18:00535 votes out of 23,000.

MOYEN: And who were you running against?

MOLONEY: Bobby Flynn, he was an incumbent Republican senator.

MOYEN: Okay. Why don't we back up just a little, why don't you tell me when you were born and a little bit about your schooling experience.

MOLONEY: In 1941, I went through the Catholic schools here in Lexington, Saint Catherine's Academy in grade school and Lexington Catholic High School. I went to Xavier University in Cincinnati, graduated from there and then came back to the University of Kentucky for law school. And then after law school, I had been commissioned to second lieutenant when I graduated from college through an ROTC program, and after law school I served two years in the Army. And then went to Washington and worked, initially, at the Small Business Administration as an attorney, that was my job, I did political advance work, and then I went to the Democratic National Committee in late 1967 and 00:19:00stayed there until, uh, well I went to the convention in 1968 and then Humphrey people took over, and I left and just kind of hung out as a "consultant," end of quote (laughs) til Johnson left the White House, and came back to Lexington.

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: Got involved in politics here as soon as I got back.

MOYEN: Um-hm. When you were going through school, was there a pretty well-defined, what you would call Catholic community in Lexington, or not so?

MOLONEY: Yeah, I think you could say that. Not very large, but well- defined.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: Basically Irish, although some Germans involved, some German heritage, but primarily Irish heritage. Pretty significant Irish. The numbers were never real large, but they were pretty active. And if you 00:20:00go back, you'll find a number of folks involved in politics who came from that community.

MOYEN: Right. So, would you tell me a little bit about your time in the service?

MOLONEY: Served two years; I went to school, when I first went in at Indianapolis, Adjutant General School for six weeks, and then I was assigned to a headquarters post at the Presidio of San Francisco for ten months, and then they got even with me and sent me to Korea for a year (laughs). And that was an interesting experience. I wouldn't trade the two years that I spent in the Army for any experience I've ever had, because I, well when you talk about the melting pot, I met people in the Army, I worked with people in the Army that I had to produce with, that I never would have, never would have worked with if 00:21:00I hadn't been in the Army. And you learn an awful lot about people in the Army, and it was an interesting two years, like I said, I wouldn't trade that experience for anything. I, quite frankly wouldn't mind seeing this country getting back to the point where we have some form of universal government service, whether it's military or whether it's something else, I think we need to get there.

MOYEN: Tell me a little bit about your time in Korea, did you ever see any action?

MOLONEY: No--I was with, I was assigned to the 7th Infantry Division, we were not, we had one brigade that was up at front, of course this was after hostility had ceased by a number of years. The 2nd Infantry was also over there then, and they were more north than we were. Well, DMZ does not follow the 38th parallel, 38th parallel obviously goes straight across, the DMZ starts all the, I guess it would be the 00:22:00western end of Korea above the DMZ, above the 38th parallel and kind of drops below the 38th parallel by the time it gets to the east coast. We were, actually about thirty-five miles, forty miles due north of Seoul, is where we were stationed. We had some incidents while we were there, I was on duty one night when they had, somebody rolled some grenades down a hill on a patrol of ours, and I got to wake the chief of staff up and tell him that, that wasn't a lot of fun (laughs). He didn't like to be wa--, didn't like bad news, but it was, it was an interesting time. It was an interesting time.

MOYEN: Okay. And could you go into just a little more detail about exactly what you did when you were in Washington?

MOLONEY: Well, initially I worked at the, like I said, Small Business Administration, I was ----------(??) an attorney, but what I did was a lot of political advance work, or go on trips, prepare a site location 00:23:00for the president coming in to visit or something of that nature. And then after Democratic National Committee, I worked for the, for John Criswell, who was the treasurer and executive director. John Bowling was chairman, from Connecticut, and John Criswell was from Oklahoma, originally a newspaperman, but he was the executive director and treasurer, and I was his assistant, and did that. Had the opportunity to be among the "old guard," how we were referred to, that went to Chicago and ran a convention in 1968, stayed there at the Stockyard Inn while that was going on.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: The old ----------(??) the oldest person in the whole thing running the thing was John Criswell, he was thirty-seven (laughs). I, I was, I was twenty-seven, but that was an interesting, you know, and we were up there three weeks, there in the Stockyard Inn, inside 00:24:00everything, you're not going anywhere, you're staying right there, because of all the problems that were going on, and that was, that was quite an experience. That was quite an experience. I think the most chilling thing, not chilling, not chilling from the viewpoint of oppressive, I was sitting in my office, I was sitting in my office, sitting in my office, and I looked up, and there stands my father, well my father's been dead for four years. The man standing there was Mayor Daily, the original Mayor Daily, his profile was identical to that of my father's, I mean I was, I didn't quite know what to do, and ironically the next Sunday, there was this little church near to where 00:25:00the Stockyard Inn was, Saint Bridget's, which is the mayor's church, and I walk in, I go in and sit down, and this guy turns around and looks at me, and another guy looks at me and says, "Who are you?" And I told them who I was. "Where do you work?" I said, "Democratic National Committee," "Oh, you work for the convention?" "Yeah." "You'll be all right, but be careful, this is the mayor's pew" (both laugh). And sure enough, just two or three minutes later, here he comes, but I felt a little uncomfortable, because those were, fairly good sized gentleman were questioning me (laughs). But that was, that was interesting.

MOYEN: Okay, so as all this was going on, you, you were born in '41, and your dad's elected in '44.

MOLONEY: Forty-three, '43.

MOYEN: Forty-three.

MOLONEY: First election, took office in '44. Of course, I don't remember much about that. The election I remember was the, was the '51 election, and then his House elections.

MOYEN: But you grew up with him serving in office.

MOLONEY: Yes.

MOYEN: When did you start thinking, "I want to do this. I'm going to do this as well."

MOLONEY: I don't think I ever didn't think about it, from the time I was old enough to conceptualize what was involved, I just always thought I would do that.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: And when I came back, I came back, I came into Lexington in 1969, in fact went to the airport to see President Johnson get on an airplane and go to Texas, and I got in my ----------(??) and drove to Lexington, and started a law practice, and immediately got involved in the Democratic primary. James Barker who was, my cousin Brian Moloney had been comm--, well he was Commonwealth Attorney, and he was not going to run for reelection. James Barker, who was his assistant, was going to run for election, and he was running ----------(??), who 00:27:00later became judge, was county attorney, and he decided he was going to run for Commonwealth Attorney. Well, George looked, turned to me and he asked me if I would manage his campaign, and I did, and the two things I remember about it most vividly is the work we put in it, but more importantly, we took a poll on the first of April, and Angelucci had thirty-seven percent of the vote, and Barker had twelve percent of the vote. And everybody looked at the poll and said, "Well, we're through." And I said, and I'd had the opportunity to see polls and all that in Washington, and I said, "No, we're not." I said, "Well look at these numbers." Four percent of the people knew who George Barker was, but he got twelve percent of the vote, eighty-six percent of the people knew who Armand Angelucci was and he got thirty-seven percent 00:28:00of the vote. We won 57 to 43. Worked hard, and then that final, that was a real irony, is that the Democratic ticket's running against Joe Johnson who is a Republican county judge, and he's got a strong ticket, I mean, let me tell you who was on his ticket for, that's when we had county commissioners in Kentucky. Joe Johnson was county judge, a fellow by the name of John Higgins, Higgins KAI(??), he's still around, they ran, he was running for county commissioner, Dr. David Stevens, running for county commissioner, Lowell Hopkins(??), running for county commissioner. Well, our candidate for county judge, Democratic candidate was Bob Stevens, he was an assistant county attorney, and Doc Fowl(??), Jerry D. Lynch(??), and Ted E. Marshall(??) were our county commissioners. It was kind of up in the air as to how the campaign 00:29:00was going to be run, and I was asked to come to a meeting out at Jack Lynch's tobacco warehouse, and they asked if I would serve as campaign chairman. I said yes, they said, "Well, we have to vote on it," and I was elected campaign chairman about eight to seven (laughs). We won, we won all but one office that fall, including a circuit judgeship for Armand Angelucci, who I ran a campaign against in the primary. Nolan Carter, who was circuit judge died and the Democratic Party got to select its nominee, and they selected Angelucci. So I was calling all these people on the phone, asking them to vote for Angelucci that I'd called in the Spring asking them to vote against him. And it, you know, I came out of that, and the next office available was two years 00:30:00later, the state Senate, and I said, "I'm going for it." I served as Assistant Commonwealth Attorney under George Barker for two years, and then decided I was going for that position.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Was that a pretty hard campaign?

MOLONEY: Very. They redistricted, and the prim--, during the pri--, during the spring of '71, pretty sure that's right. Yeah. Spring of '71 they had a redistricting, because the census was '70, so '71 redistricting, and Bobby Flynn who was incumbent, and Gib Downing who was incumbent, Gib being the Democrat, drew a map, and they split downtown Lexington right in half, which split the black vote. Where they made their mistake is that they drew the line two houses from my 00:31:00house. If they'd gone one more block, I'm not going to be in the 13th District, I'm going to be in the 12th. But they didn't. They left me in the 13th, and it was, it was a heartfelt campaign, door to door, a lot of people, and like I said, I think it's 535 votes out of 23,000. And then we had redistricting in 19--, actually the redistricting bill, this helped. The map was so stupid looking, and it got to the point that I took to every event I had to go to, and one district was colored in red, and one was in black because of the contrast, and there would be pockets--typical, classic old gerrymandering, and we had, and ----------(??) the redistricting plan was declared unconstitutional before the general election, which, by the federal courts, which 00:32:00gave me another issue; I could play with that a little bit. And we, we redistricted in '72, and when we redistricted in '72, I mean the first thing I did when I got down there is I went to see J. R. Miller, who was Democratic Party chairman, and if you know enough about Mr. Miller, he was, he was the Democratic Party chairman; he was strong, and he and Wendell were still very, very close, I went to see him and I said, "J.R., I want to draw the Fayette County map." He said, "You can draw the Fayette County map." And I did. And what I basically did was take a, take the city of Lexington, the whole, the inner city, combined with the things that touched it, and make that one district, made kind of a hole in a doughnut, and it's basically stayed that way since that time, and that was the district that I represented for the twenty-five, 00:33:00the elections that I had run in, I ran in that district. It's expanded some since then as the city gets larger, but it's basically the same concept, and that kept the African American population together. In fact, that district has the second largest African American population in Kentucky.

MOYEN: Okay. Did you, or did the plan take any criticism when you redrew it, or--

MOLONEY: Nope. It was, it made sense. It made sense. It kept the older parts of Lexington together, which are different than the suburbs.

MOYEN: Right. Did you enjoy campaigning?

MOLONEY: Yes, I did.

MOYEN: Is that something that you were--

MOLONEY: I did. Had a lot of fun at it. Enjoyed walking the streets, that's what we did, meeting people, campaign rallies, I don't like much about campaign speeches, but I enjoyed the campaign. I ----------(??) aspect of it, and that got, you know, more and more expensive as time 00:34:00went on, my first campaign I probably spent several hundred dollars is all; by the time I run my last campaign it was over a hundred, and it was ridiculous that it was over a hundred, but it was, because television had, television had arrived.

MOYEN: Now, you're probably one of the few senators who's actually able to walk, a pretty big majority of your district--

MOLONEY: Well, I could run, I couldn't run, my knees hurt too much (laughs), but yeah you could walk my district. You can walk it. Takes some effort, but I mean, it's, you can do it. And we did it; we'd go out in teams, cover the whole district.

MOYEN: Did you have anything when you were running where you told people, "This is what I want to do and--"

MOLONEY: I think the one thing I did emphasize in every election I ran is that I was going to make sure that ----------(??) the University of Kentucky retained its position in higher education in Kentucky, and 00:35:00that is at the top, and I think I helped do that over the years.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: So that was, that was an issue for you even then?

MOYEN: Yes.

MOLONEY: Okay.

MOYEN: Absolutely. Absolutely. And the other reforms that, you know, I, I made no bones about my support for very strong social programs in Kentucky to help poor people, to help kids in trouble, those kind of programs I was always very supportive of, I know during the years subsequent to initiating, even after I stayed there long and got to be chairman of the Appropriations Committee, the human resources budget was always a budget that a lot of people didn't pay much attention to. But over a period Marshall Long, representative Marshall Long from Shelbyville and I would work, work on trying to make it as strong as we could, and I think we were fairly successful.

MOYEN: Once you were elected, who's, who was the first politician to 00:36:00give you a call? Do you recall?

MOLONEY: Well, it wasn't the first politician to give me a call, the first person I saw after it became apparent I was going to win was Wendell Ford, because I was at his headquarters. He was out here on, he was out here on North Broadway, and he had called me ahead of time and said, "Make sure you come down by my headquarters," and he was really the first person that I saw, office holder that I saw.

MOYEN: How would you, how would you describe your relationship with him?

MOLONEY: I think it was very strong. I had a great deal of admiration for him. He's probably the best Kentucky politician in my lifetime, and he was very effective as governor; I think he's very effective as senator, and very effective as a strong Democrat.

MOYEN: Right. Did you, after your election, did you go down to Kentucky 00:37:00Dam Village?

MOLONEY: Yeah.

MOYEN: What type of power playing goes on there, or--

MOLONEY: Well--

MOYEN: at this time was it still, "Here's what the governor says."

MOLONEY: "Here's what the governor says." I mean, let's see, I had gone down there in December, well, the first time I went down there, there's a good story on that one. The first time I went down there was after the 1969 county elections, when the Democrats carried Fayette County, swept Fayette County, and Bob Stevens was elected county judge, at the same time the Democrats took back over Jefferson County and Todd Hallenbeck was elected county judge there. Well, J. R. Miller had both, had had, Hallenbeck had his campaign manager, and Bob Stevens and me, as his campaign manager, flown to the Kentucky Dam Village, 00:38:00basically to say, you know, "The Democrats are coming back and here's two good examples. We've carried Fayette County, we've carried Jefferson County, now we're going to carry everything two years from now with Wendell." He, he just said everything two years from now. Well, that night we were at J. R.'s cabin, and he was kind of holding fort, and Bob Stevens, and Bob, one of the nicest people you'll ever meet in your life, naive as he could be about politics, particularly then, said, "Well you know, there's no way in the world that Wendell Ford is going to beat," we were just talking, conversing, he didn't know who J. R. was, he said, "there's no way in the world Wendell Ford is going to beat Bert Combs," because Stevens was a big Combs man. And J. R. looked at him and just kind of growled back (laughs), and I looked at Bob, and I said, "Bob, they flew us down here, and if you keep talking like that, we're going to walk back, now be quiet." But the Kentucky Dam Village situation, you know, go down there and I would 00:39:00go down there in '71, December of '71, no question about leadership, leadership was as the governor said it was going to be, committees were picked at that time, they were going to tell you who was going to be, they'd tell you again who was going to be the chairman, and that stayed pretty much that way until 1980 when it changed. We took it, we took the Senate over, the so-called Black Sheep took the Senate over in 1980, took it over from Julian when we went to Committee of the Whole, and that was really in '79, special session, and '80, John Y. was elected, John Y could care who was leadership, he, didn't bother him, "You all want to do this--." He never, I don't think he ever talked to 00:40:00anybody about it, and so we went ahead and changed it then.

MOYEN: You mentioned that the governor was still choosing the leadership in '71. How would you describe Bill Sullivan and "Dee" Huddleston there, type of, the type of leadership that they exerted in the Senate?

MOLONEY: "Dee" very quietly exerted leadership, but you know, he would also work with the other people in leadership.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: Tom Garrett was a more forceful floor leader than was, than was "Dee." Bill Sullivan was the first person I remember who broke the unwritten rule of the Democratic, the vote of the, Democratic caucus being binding on the entire membership. Bill stood up and as ------- ---(??) there, and he said, "I know which way this vote's going to go, 00:41:00and I will not remain a member, remain in this caucus while this vote's going to go, because I cannot bind myself." And he got up and walked out. You could start to see at that point people beginning to assert themselves. That's been, now, this is when your John Berrys started coming there, and Lowell Hughes starting to come in there, and those kind, those kind of folks are starting to come in, Danny Meyer from Louisville, and some others, and this, we're not going to go along with this, let's back up, let's rethink this. And so you're starting to see some change in leadership, and change in leadership attitude, it became more, "All right, this is an issue we've got to deal with, let's get a consensus on it," rather than, "this is the issue we're going to deal with, here's how we're going to deal with it." It began to change in the middle '70s, changed considerably during Julian's term, by the end of Julian's term, I'd say the, the leadership fiat was gone.

MOYEN: Right. Were you able to even say to anyone that these are the committees I'd like to serve on?

MOLONEY: Yes. Yes. When I first got down there, you could ask, or I was interested in serving on Judiciary Committee. I got on Judiciary Committee. I was interested in serving on Elections and Constitutional Amendments, I got on that committee. I didn't care about the other one, so I ended up on Banking and Insurance, didn't like it and stayed on it one term, and then went somewhere else. And had the opportunity to get on the Appropriations Committee, and I enjoyed that.

MOYEN: Um-hm. With your background, with other people I've interviewed, I say, so what surprises did you have when you got to Frankfort? What was not as you thought it would be? Was there anything for you that was--

MOLONEY: Oh I think, I think the initial impression of being told how you're going to vote on certain issues was the biggest thing, because 00:43:00I'm pretty bull-headed and don't necessarily go along with people on everything, and that was the first thing that impacted on me, and I'd say that was the biggest issue.

MOYEN: Okay. [Telephone rings].

MOLONEY: I hope that telephone's not bothering you.

[End of Tape 1, Side 1]

[Beginning of Tape 1, Side 2]

MOYEN: All right, you may have just answered this question to some extent, but I was going to ask you, was government transitioning, even then in the early '70s, to a more modern system in any ways that you could observe?

MOLONEY: Well, no, the big issue that Governor Ford dealt with was 00:44:00reorganization, and he combined a lot of the departments into the cabinet system, so there was some transitioning there, that would be the initial area you'd see it in.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: Then you would see, as we moved on through the '70s, more transitioning to the point that the legislature became more of a, more of an equal partner, I think in some areas it's probably gone too far, quite frankly, but I think it's done a pretty decent job.

MOYEN: Was there any legislation that you either sponsored or that you yourself wrote in those first couple of sessions that sticks out in your mind as something you were really proud of, or--

MOLONEY: Yeah. Yeah. Nineteen seventy-four, I was, I'd say the co-author, or co-sponsor, and primary sponsor in the Senate, did a 00:45:00lot of work over a two year period of time in completely rewriting the criminal code of Kentucky, I mean, that's the entire penal system of, set of penal laws in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, we rewrote completely. Subsequent to that, I came up with the idea of the Administrative Regulation Review Subcommittee, where every administrative regulation under which government operated was repealed, and had to be refilled and reviewed by a legislative subcommittee for, to determine whether or not the agency had the authority to promulgate it, and did it conform to their statutory authority that they had. That area in my opinion today has gone too far. That Administrative Regulation Subcommittee has set itself up as a super 00:46:00legislature, mini-super legislature, and they've gone too far, I think they've, or overstepped their bounds as far as, in effect, telling an administrative regulation, an administrative agency, after that agency has been given the authority to promulgate a regulation, "We don't like the regulation you promulgated." Well that's not their job. Their job is either to tell them they got the right to promulgate a regulation or they don't have the right. Once they give them that power, as long as the regulation is promulgated in accordance with that power, it's legitimate. I think the legislature has gone too far in that area.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: But I think that's probably a development--well to turn back, the courts will turn that back in my opinion, I think they probably already have in a couple of instances.

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: But mainly, I guess, the two big ones I wrote, a lot of little pieces of legislation over the years that I contributed to that I think were important, the entire juvenile code, when we rewrote it, had a lot of, had a lot of impact on that. Just as I stayed there longer and 00:47:00got more involved in the budget process, I got less involved in writing legislation, just didn't have time.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Let me ask you about Julian Carroll and his leadership style as governor. What changed once he became governor?

MOLONEY: Julian knew government, he knew how it functioned, knew how to make it work, having come through the ranks being speaker. Julian wanted things his way one hundred percent, and when they didn't go his way one hundred percent he'd get angry and retaliate. That, in my opinion, is what cost him the Senate in 1979, coupled with the personalities that were there then, and the willingness of those personalities to take on a sitting governor.

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: And Julian probably, he came into office with something that not, I don't think any governor that I served under had, and that is a massive surplus of money when he came in, by virtue of the, of the severance tax that Wendell had passed. And Julian spent it all, and had fun doing it, but the bottom line on it is that he ended up, in my opinion, greatly weakening the governor's office by permitting the legislature to take over a number of areas, and specifically putting us in a position of taking over the budget.

MOYEN: Okay. Now this, most people when you talk to them would say 00:49:00that's John Y. Brown who's done that, but can you give me some more examples--

MOLONEY: Groundwork, groundwork had been laid in the '79 special session. When we went in the Senate to a Committee of the Whole--we started off, well, everything started off, we were looking at the governor's contingency fund. And--

MOYEN: Now, you're talking about after Thelma Stovall calls that--

MOLONEY: Calls a special session, we were in a special session.

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: And bad weather hit and Julian couldn't called us back, and opened the thing up to a lot broader topics than what was on it originally, everybody remembers House Bill 44.

MOYEN: Right.

MOLONEY: There was a Senate Bill 44. Senate Bill 44 was the capitol construction legislation, which required every project that met with, that fell within the definition of the capitol project, to be approved, and ----------(??) in the budget and approved by the General Assembly. And what prompted that were things that had been not in the budget 00:50:00but been authorized expenditure from the contingency fund, and George Atkins was auditor at that time, and George would come in, and say how horrible all this was. And one night, Joe, John Berry, myself, Danny Meyer, Tom Easterly was probably there, if J. R. was in the Senate by then, he was there. I don't remember who else, but we were in a restaurant in Frankfort talking about what were we getting ready to do on this Committee of the Whole, Lowell Hughes was there, talking about what we were getting ready to do on the Committee of the, Committee of the Whole, and Jim Eisen, who was a reporter for the Louisville Times, came up and he says, "Can I sit down with you all?" Now, Jim was a distant cousin of mine on my mother's side, and I said, "Jim, but you 00:51:00can't talk about," he said, "no, I'll just sit here and listen." Well, we were talking about how we were going to do this, and this, and this, and we'd already set the policy, and everybody who testified before the Committee of the Whole had to take an oath, Atkins had taken an oath, Will Wallace testified to taking an oath, well, we'd asked Julian if he would testify before the Committee of the Whole, and of course he said he would, and Jim said, "Are you going to put him under oath?" I said, "We're going to put him under oath." "He'll never do it." Well he did. And he, the ----------(??) said. Well, the next witness we called was Clark Beauchamp. Clark Beauchamp was "Doc" Beauchamp's son. Clark was the director of facilities in the Fine Arts Administration cabinet, and a career public server, and I use the word public server very, very generously with him, because he was a public server. He came in and 00:52:00he took his oath and he supported everything George Atkins said, now he was a governmental, he was a governor's appointee. Now, that took a lot of guts to do, and he did it. And I think ----------(??) was one of the legislature, at least the Senate part of the legislature, asserted himself and said, "We're not going to give it up," and then 1980 comes along, and the leaders who were there in 1979 were still there, except they didn't get elected. You still had Garrett and Sullivan, and McCuiston, and Kelsey Friend, they didn't get elected, a whole new group came in, and a whole new leadership in committee came in.

MOYEN: You had, you all had Julian Carroll on the stand for quite some time, didn't you?

MOLONEY: I remember the most part of the day, maybe a little longer than that.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Did you realize at the time, "Hey, this is a pretty big 00:53:00deal"?

MOLONEY: Sure.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: Sure you did. Committee of the Whole is a big deal, had never been done. I don't think it had ever been done in Kentucky's history, we couldn't find any evidence of it ever having been done.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: But it was interesting times.

MOYEN: During Carroll's term as governor, that was the first time that you penned a draft of the juvenile justice bill, wasn't it, I think in '77?

MOLONEY: Could have been.

MOYEN: What was the impetus for writing that bill? What did you see--

MOLONEY: Just in my law practice, you know our juvenile, the juvenile laws that we had in effect at that time were totally outdated, you couldn't find, they were spread throughout the statutes, and what we were going to try to do is to take an orderly flow from the beginning to the end of a child going through the juvenile justice system, starting off with administrative issues, dealing with the status offender, you know, the kids that, they're having trouble in school, they're runaways, that type of thing, and then moving on up as you get 00:54:00more serious in an effort to try to deal, and be prepared to deal, with hardened criminals who happen to be under the age of eighteen. And I think we put a system together that worked fairly well.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Could you tell me a little bit about the changes that developed after the Constitutional amendment passed in '75 that reorganized the legal system? When I--

MOLONEY: The court system, you mean? MOYEN: Yes. When I read the court system was reorganized in 1975, what was it like before, what was it like after?

MOLONEY: Well, you had, we had Court of Appeals, which was our house court at that time, you had the circuit courts, and then you had two groups of, three groups of law courts. You had city police courts, which would be courts of criminal jurisdiction only within the city limits. You had the ----------(??) court, which was a court of both civil and criminal jurisdiction, you had probate court in there, you 00:55:00had juvenile court in there, this is a county court, you had probate court, you had juvenile court, it had criminal jurisdiction, as well, and it had the city jurisdiction up to a small amount. And then you had the magistrate's courts, the magistrate's still held sway as judges. Neither the police court, or the county court, or the magistrate courts, had to be presided over by someone who was trained as a lawyer. In fact, the police court here in Lexington for the longest number of years was presided over by Judge Tom Reddy, who was not a lawyer. He, he was, he's my cousin, he was judge forever and ever, and finally my brother ran against him and beat him, which made for an interesting election there too, but, and then, subsequent to that time, the police court judge was always a lawyer, and we had county judges here in 00:56:00Fayette County who had been lawyers for a long time, so they presided over Senate, we had trial commissioners and they were always lawyers, but the Lexington system didn't change a whole lot, other than the fact that we now elect all of our judges. Trial commissioners were appointed by county judge, police judge was elected, county judge obviously was elected, magistrates were elected, but the system was not, you know there was, you did not have to be legally trained to be a judge in those courts. Now, quite frankly, I don't know if that legal training was actually even necessary in some of those courts, because there were no courts of due right as ----------(??) law.

MOYEN: Right.

MOLONEY: But some of those judges are better than some of the ones we've got now (laughs).

MOYEN: Um-hm (laughs). Could you tell me a little bit, we talked about this some, but when the special session was called in 1979--

MOLONEY: Thelma's.

MOYEN: Right.

MOLONEY: The first one. Before the flood hit.

MOYEN: Right, before the flood hit, I presume you thought, oh, this is for her to get some name recognition, she needs some publicity, she's going to run for governor--

MOLONEY: She called me at home right before she called it, and said, "The governor has just left the state, and I'm sitting here with Jay, and we want to call, I'm going to call a special session, we're going to do something on taxes." And I said, "Are you sure you want to do that?" And she said, "Well, Jay thinks it's the right idea, we want to do it." I said, "Well, you're the governor." And she did it. I don't think it helped her at all. I think it ended up hurting her.

MOYEN: Um-hm. At what time did you realize this was going to go beyond helping or hurting her and actually making some big changes? Was it when Julian promised to call you back, or--

MOLONEY: And expand the call. And expand the call.

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: When he agreed to call us back and expand the call, ---------- (??) agreement, everybody realized we got, this is going to be --------- -(??).

MOYEN: Who did he talk to to do that? Who was that promised to, or was that--

MOLONEY: As far as our Senate side is concerned, I know at the request to respond to the call was to folks like Lowell Hughes and John Berry, those kind of folks, because they had the opportunity to do some more things. I did not speak with Julian specifically on that, we weren't real close at that time.

MOYEN: Why, why was that?

MOLONEY: I made a speech he didn't like (laughs), on personal service contracts, and needled him a little bit, and Julian has pretty thin skin.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: We, we'd gone through, the person I'd gone through the personal service contract with, this is probably what ended up getting me named 00:59:00chairman of the Appropriations Committee, because I was willing to do that kind of work, and added up the personal service contracts that had been ----------(??) during his administration, for lawyers and engineers and surveyors and things like that, and they added up to more than what had been under Ford, and Nunn, and Breathitt combined. Part of that was inflation, but part of it was spending that surplus, and the line that really got Julian mad was when I said, you know, in the middle '30s, early '50s, in the '50s, there was a sign, Ed Pritchard had the saying that, Jack Louis was, Jimmy Jack Louis was running in eastern Kentucky, "Pin up the sack for Jimmy Jack," that's "Happy's" 01:00:00son in law, and I said, "We've now come to the point where we're filling up the barrel for Julian Carroll." Whew, he got hot. Because he was listening to it on the, you know, the television, which was on down there, and I know somebody was in the room there, and he got very upset with me (laughs). We have since got along fine, but it was tenuous there for a while (laughs).

MOYEN: Um-hm, um-hm.

MOLONEY: I thought it was a pretty good statement, pretty good line, but I don't think he liked it right then.

MOYEN: Let me chase a rabbit for just a second, did you know Ed Pritchard pretty well?

MOLONEY: I had an opportunity to have a number of sessions talking with him, being around him, yeah.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: Actually, probab--, may have been during the Brown years than any other time, even though I knew who he was, he'd been at my father's house, and my daddy was still alive and been around him, he was around, 01:01:00around a lot. Brown picked his brain a lot.

MOYEN: What were your impressions of him?

MOLONEY: Oh, he's brilliant. He's absolutely brilliant. You know I, one of the smartest people I've ever seen. In fact, when I, the story line, a great one from years when I was an Assistant Commonwealth Attorney, we were trying a professor from the University of Kentucky who had bought a brand new IBM typewriter out of the back end of a car for a couple hundred dollars and got charged with receiving stolen property. He happened to be a candidate for congress. And everybody said, "Well, that's just a Democrat setting him up." Well you know, we went to trial, and he was represented, and I don't remember who his defense attorney was right off the top of my head, but anyway, his name was Gene Mason. During the trial, uh, testimony came up that Henry 01:02:00Hughes, was a local lawyer, Henry Hughes was ----------(??) around, funny as he could be. Henry testified that he was sitting at home on a Saturday morning watching cartoons and heard a little thump at the front door and went to the front door, and lo and behold there was a typewriter still in its box. "Where did it come from?" "I don't have the slightest idea." "Well what did you do with it?" "Well, I called Herb Sled, and said, 'Herb I found this typewriter on my front--," I can't, Herb was representing Gene. Well, they had a hearing in front of the judges as to whether or not Herb Sled would have to say what happened to the typewriter, and it was going to be contempt of court, well Herb hired Ed Pritchard to represent him, way down in the court of, it was in court of appeals, and had a special hearing in front of them, had a hearing in the court--, not in the courtroom, but in the conference room, and they were talking about contempt of court and people in jail, and Pritchard sat over there, and this is before 01:03:00he'd lost his eyesight, but he still would shut his eyes a lot, and he says, "You have no idea what it's like talking about going to jail" (both laugh). It just broke the tension right there, you know, but he'd shake that big head of his, and do that, but he is an interesting person to talk to and to be around, fascinating, just fascinating.

MOYEN: Getting back to the legislature, could you tell me a little more about the Black Sheep Squadron (Moloney laughs)? How it evolved, how it got its name? MOLONEY: I was not among the folks that started it, that's for sure. I came back to Lexington every night.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: And the folks that started this thing stayed down there in Frankfort for the most part, Ed O'Daniel, hadn't mentioned his name before, but Ed definitely was involved, Lowell Hughes, and John Berry, Easterly was there, Danny Meyer was brought in, and some others, and 01:04:00they--

MOYEN: Would, would Joe Wright or Ed Ford have been--

MOLONEY: Ed Ford was there, yes, Joe Wright was there, no question about it, but they could be standing in front of--"I wasn't part of those conversations, just a, where we're headed, what we want to do," but the next day I'd talk to them and they said, "Here's what we talked about last night." And it was just an evolution of, of a new generation of people in the General Assembly coming in and deciding, "We're not going to do it the old way." And I, I was not one of those who was one of the proposals, people who proposed it. I was involved in seeing it through, I got involved legislatively once it got going I think pretty heavily, particularly in the '79 special session, and there were some real solid kind of folks that wanted to see some improvement done in the legislature as an institution, and they got it done. I mean J. 01:05:00R., J. R. is one of the finest human beings I've ever met in my life, I mean he is just, he was a true citizen legislator. I mean he was just, just an excellent perf--, wonderful human being, silent as he could be, never gets ruffled, most expressive I've ever heard him say in my life was "Dagummit," and he just, he just was an exceptional leader.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Did you find yourself ever disagreeing with their agenda, where there times when you thought, "Yeah, this is pretty good, but I don't know about--"

MOLONEY: I think I probably had some reluctance in some areas because I probably considered myself coming a little bit from the old school, having come up that way, but I saw the possibilities, I think, of what 01:06:00could occur, and ultimately what did occur. And realized that, that having a list with yes and no votes put on your desk when you walked in in the morning wasn't the best way to run a legislature.

MOYEN: When did that end?

MOLONEY: With Julian.

MOYEN: Okay. That, was, did that continue through his entire term?

MOLONEY: Not in the Senate.

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: Don't know about the House.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: I guess it didn't continue in the House either.

MOYEN: Okay. Do you recall who you supported in the Democratic primary in 1979?

MOLONEY: Seventy-nine.

MOYEN: When John Y--

MOLONEY: John Y. John Y.

MOYEN: Were you supporting his--

MOLONEY: Yeah.

MOYEN: campaign?

MOLONEY: Yeah.

MOYEN: Tell me what that's like as a senator, how do you choose when you've got this field in the primary? Do you go based on, "This is my friend," or "I'd really like to play the line with this person," or how much of it is who is going to win here and I can work this relationship to where it's picking a horse race.

MOLONEY: Well, let me tell you a couple of stories on that. Nineteen seventy-one, I'm a candidate, and I come, my family comes from the Combs faction. Of course, both Ford and Combs come from the Combs faction, though Ford has got some immovability to move across party lines, across faction lines. I had an appointment to see Judge Combs 01:08:00down in Frank--, down in Louisville, to one, and I knew he was going to resign his judgeship and run for governor, and I wanted to tell him I was going to run for senator, and I would like to look forward to working with him, and I would hope that if it wouldn't cause his campaign problems he could help me.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: And I drove to Louisville to see him, and he wasn't there. We had a specific appointment and he wasn't there. Well, I was young and impetuous in those days. Now, people would probably say I'm old and impetuous. I drove back to Lexington, but on the way you've got to pass Frankfort, so I stopped in Frankfort and went up to Wendell Ford's office and said, "I'm going to run for senator, and I'm going to be for you, and I hope you can be for me" (Moyen laughs). Yeah. As far as Brown is concerned, I, you look at the field, he brought into it something new, I mean, and you know, his father and my father 01:09:00ran against each other twice, each won one time, he beat my daddy in 1927, and my daddy beat him in 1951. They didn't, they were not close, but, and I didn't know John Y., knew who he was, didn't know him. In fact (laughs), in fact the first time he showed up at the Democratic Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner here in Fayette County, he committed what could have been his biggest political faux pas in Fayette County, he went up and introduced himself to Bill Kenton, and asked him which one of the Moloney's was he (laughs). And Bill didn't like that (laughs). But I just hit it off with him well, and hit it off with Phyllis, I thought she was just absolutely wonderful, kind as she could be, a great asset, and remain close to her today, talk to her probably more 01:10:00than I do John Y., but I just thought that he brought something that nobody else brought.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Did you think he was a successful governor? I mean, obviously he was successful at his, well, his first campaign, but--

MOLONEY: I think he was successful in bringing some very bright people into government who contributed significantly.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: That, I think makes him a governor who made a mark on the state.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: He ran into some very serious money problems which prevented him from doing a lot of things he wanted to do, and that the economy just went south on him.

MOYEN: Right.

MOLONEY: And he managed through that, but he, I think his biggest contribution as governor were the people he brought into government who 01:11:00were there, and who were still around.

MOYEN: Who are you thinking of in particular?

MOLONEY: The people in economic development that he brought in. The Jim King's, those kind of folks who contributed significantly to what they were, what we were doing. Bright people. Weren't afraid to, weren't afraid to cut through a bunch of red tape and say just because that's the way it's been done is the way it's going to continue to be done, and he didn't believe in that.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: Grady Stumbo was a good example. Grady did a great job as Secretary of Cabinet of Human Resources, and so I think that kind of contribution is very significant.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Tell me a little bit about when you became chair of Senate Appropriations and--

MOLONEY: Nineteen-eighty.

MOYEN: And did you feel well suited for that position as soon as you 01:12:00were chair?

MOLONEY: I think I did pretty soon. Well, I think I did, because I had done the work during the special session of '79 on budget issues, primarily on the capitol construction issues, and the personal service contracts, which gave me a pretty good grasp of the overall concept of the budget. I made a deliberate effort to raise the profile of the Senate committee in the budget, in budget negotiations. Prior to that time, the Appropriations and Revenue Committee in the Senate especially sitting back and handling bills, waited on the budget to come over from the House and ratified it and went on.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: I talked with our leadership and with members of that committee, and I said, "We're not going to do it that way, if you all will go with me. We're going to have active hearings from the very beginning; we're going to develop our own budget, and then when we have to go conference committee," and conference committees didn't start until about that time, they didn't have many conference committees prior to 1980, and 01:13:00we have to go to conference committee, and had to explain to some folks what a conference committee was: "We're going to have our positions, and we're going to defend them. And this is going to be a budget written by both the House and the Senate," and it became that way.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: Tell me about the complexities of the budget, particularly with John Y. Brown, you talked about the budget troubles that he got into. Why was that, and why, you know, when I was looking at newspaper articles, we're talking about, you were talking about the struggles that we were having in state government, and that the money just wasn't there, particularly when in the rest of the country they were starting to move out of the recession of the early, late '70s, early '80s.

MOYEN: Our economy has always lagged behind the rest of the economy because we did not have the manufacturing sector that the rest of the, that many other states had. We did not have the manufacturing sector 01:14:00until Toyota came in and with all these bigger companies. That's the reason we recover, we did recover, and we still recover more slowly on a recession than the other agents. I think one of the major factors that led us to get into trouble in our budget was our revenue forecasting. We at that time had a revenue forecasting--I think early on, when I first started serving in Appropriations Committee, revenue forecasting was done after you decided what the spending was going, spending level was going to be, and it was never done in writing. They'd come in and say, "Here's what the revenue is going to be, try to reduce that to writing," ----------(??) reduce it to writing, and you go back and say, "Well, you said revenue forecasting was going to be such and such, I don't remember," well, that continued, and we had revenue forecasting based upon what was needed to be spent as contrasted to what was expected to be received. Now, that continued until we started doing some revenue casting in the Senate, and then 01:15:00during the Jones years, and I'm not trying to skip the Collins years, because I think they're very important years, but during the Jones years when he got into budget problems, we forced the Joint Forecasting Group on Jones in response to his request that Marshall Long and I, Marshall was by that time chair of A&R, that we would go along and assist him in budget cuts, and back him up, and say they're necessary, because I think we had some credibility, and we of course would join, you know, Joint Forecasting on him at that time, but prior to that time, your forecasting was the weak link of the whole thing. You tell, you tell government people they're going to have $6 billion to spend, they're going to spend $6 billion. Well, if you only have $5.5, then they've got a $500 million shortfall. They really didn't have that 01:16:00shortfall, they just over forecasted.

MOYEN: Right. Let me ask you something. You mentioned chairing Appropriations and Revenue in 1980. Did I misread? Did you chair that for a short period in the 70s? MOLONEY: Um-hm. I chaired it during Wendell's second term.

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: Second session. And I was removed when Julian became governor.

MOYEN: Okay. Did you know that that was coming?

MOLONEY: Yes (laughs).

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: Soon as he became governor (both laugh), had no doubt about it. Had no doubt about it. He made, what's the fella's name? Up in Ashland, ----------(??) chairman Roy, I can't remember Roy's last name, he was chairman, and they reverted back to, you know, doing nothing.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Okay. What other important legislation can you think of that you sponsored during John Y's sessions, or by this time--

MOLONEY: By that time I was basically out of sponsoring legislation. I take that back, I think probably it was during that period of time that I did put together the domestic violence legislature. I think that was during Brown's term, I'm pretty sure it was during Brown's term, I put that together, and I think that was pretty significant piece of legislation. But by that time, I'm basically out of writing bills and into writing budgets. You just don't have time to do it all. And, doing what we were doing with the budget, particularly when the House budget came over and we'd have to start cutting, my name on the bill wasn't going to help the bill (laughs), and I knew that. I'd get, I'd get somebody else to handle my legislation.

MOYEN: Okay. Did you find people stopping by fewer times to say, "Hey, 01:18:00sign on," or--

MOLONEY: No. No. No.

MOYEN: What were some of the instances that you can think of where people just really raised Cain, or really were upset about some of the things you ended up having to cut out of the budget at different times. Can you think of anything that was most painful, either for you or others?

MOLONEY: I'm sure you could give me some for instance, some examples, and I would recall them, but right now off the top of my head, no I can't recall them. I remember the juvenile code, we, we enacted it with a delayed effective date, and then we had to delay the effective date a second time because the funding wasn't there for it. That wasn't pleasant, I remember that one.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: Others I can't recall off the top of my head.

MOYEN: Let's talk about Martha Lane Collins, her election as governor. 01:19:00Did you support her?

MOLONEY: Yes.

MOYEN: Well--

MOLONEY: So far.

MOYEN: So far (laughs).

MOLONEY: Picked them wrong the next time.

MOYEN: Now, was it during her first term that you really started getting involved in education?

MOLONEY: Yeah.

MOYEN: To some extent? MOLONEY: Yeah.

MOYEN: Can you explain how that developed, or--

MOLONEY: Well it became a big issue in her first session of the legislature, and it is a major issue because it had funding attached to it; you've got to get involved in it, and we did. And did what we could to try to get the legislation passed.

MOYEN: Now, not much ended up happening during that first session--

MOLONEY: No.

MOYEN: but she calls the special session.

MOLONEY: When we got some things done.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Do you recall any important facets of that?

MOLONEY: If I remember correctly, most of the negotiation on that was 01:20:00done in the House, and was pretty much a done deal by the time it got to the Senate, because the Senate was involved in those negotiations, and we worked the thing out that the Senate leadership, Senate education people worked it out over in the House so it would, when it came over to us, we could move it through pretty quickly.

MOYEN: In 1984, you and Ed O'Daniel introduced a concurrent resolution to require study of Kentucky's higher education system, I think it was Program Review and Investigation Committee. Do you recall what you were concerned about at the time?

MOLONEY: No. I really don't.

MOYEN: Okay (laughs).

MOLONEY: I really don't.

MOYEN: All right. The committee did eventually say that no overhaul of the system was needed at the time.

MOLONEY: That doesn't surprise me.

MOYEN: Okay. In 1984, you offered what you called an option, not 01:21:00a recommendation, for what the Herald Leader called a "bare bones budget," and cut pay raises. Is that particularly hard to cut state pay raises? Do you face a lot of opposition when you, when you do that? I mean, obviously it's not going to make people happy, but politically?

MOLONEY: I can remember the reaction to that, and it wasn't real positive. But it was a time, as I recall, that budget was very, very lean one, and we not only had proposed to cut state employee's pay raises, but we were going out and tapping agencies of government for their ----------(??) agency accounts to bring them into the general fund to fund the things, and I know that, that brought about a bunch of consternation, because one of the funds we went and tapped was Fish and Wildlife, and boy they got upset, and all the fish, all the NRA folks, 01:22:00and all those people got upset, and they didn't like it, but we had to do it, we didn't have a choice. And that, quite frankly, led to one of the court decisions that gave the legislature even more authority over the budget. That was the Collins v. Armstrong, Armstrong v. Collins case where David Armstrong, as attorney general sued the governor for tapping these ----------(??) agency accounts, specifically fish and wildlife, and the legislature had, to, actually sued the governor because the governor was the one that had to implement the legislation through finance and administration. And the court, in that decision, ultimately said the budget is essentially a legislative matter, which is pretty strong language.

MOYEN: Sure. Um-hm.

MOLONEY: Pretty strong language.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Let me ask you this, when you were dealing with the budget, you and your counterpart in the House, Joe Clarke, continually, in the paper, you'd see Moloney and Clarke are requesting tax increases, revenue increases over and over again, and then, you know, the Doom and Gloom, Mr. Doom and Mr. Gloom. How do you win elections when you seem to be constantly, at least quoted in the paper, as wanting to raise taxes?

MOLONEY: Well, I think I've got to look at the district I represented and how fortunate I was to represent that district, and the people who were willing to recognize that you have to pay for the services 01:24:00you want from government. Seventy-one I won, '75 I had the opposition at the last minute from the Republican Party and I won, '79 I had no opposition, actually I had a Democrat in the primary I had--well, '83 I had no opposition, '88 I had opposition and I won, that's when we rolled over, and I didn't have opposition the next time around in '92. I think a lot of it is attributable to the fact that a substantial portion of the voters in my district are pretty damn well educated. I haven't looked at the numbers recently, but the last contested election I had, I had 9,000 voters in my district who were either, and these are registered voters, not 9,000 people, but 9,000 registered voters in my 01:25:00district who were either employees of, who had a family member who were employees of the University of Kentucky. That's a pretty good base.

MOYEN: Right.

MOLONEY: That's a pretty good base. And so I think it was an issue of me, and I was consistent, I was consistent in what I said, I think I had a basis for what I said, and ironically whether you like them or not, the editorial pages of both newspapers concurred that what Joe and I was saying was right. That we needed to do what we were talking about doing.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Let me ask you, getting back to the special session on education, there was an issue with increasing teacher pay, where you delayed action on a, I think it was a $287 million package, and the debate was over longevity pay or merit pay. Do you recall that at all?

MOLONEY: I don't recall the spec--, I don't recall the specifics of it. That would be consistent with my overall philosophy, and that is I believe that you ought to provide salary increases to those who do the good job as contrasted to those who stay there a long time.

MOYEN: Um-hm, um-hm.

MOLONEY: There was, another one of the statements that I made, that I probably shouldn't make, shouldn't have made, and brought me the enmity of a lot of people, I said, you know, the pay philosophy of a state employee of the Commonwealth of Kentucky is stay alive and draw five. And not University of Kentucky, the Commonwealth of Kentucky, excuse me, is stay alive and draw five, you get your five percent if you stay there. Well, I don't like that. I don't like that. I say you pay people based on the job they do, not on the fact that they stay there.

MOYEN: Right. When you began taking a closer look at education in 01:27:00particular, do you feel like there's a good way to do that with teachers, to try and judge based on merit?

MOLONEY: Oh, I think you can develop a system, I think you can develop a system through the utilization of master teachers who know who are doing good jobs, and know which teachers are doing good jobs in classrooms. I think you definitely can do it. I don't know, I don't know that we're willing to do that, but you definitely can do it in my opinion.

MOYEN: How would you describe your relation--, I don't know if it would be a relationship, but with the KEA? I presume that they would support you on a number of things, but some of the things that you're talking about like merit pay, do you ever recall facing any opposition from them?

MOLONEY: They generally supported me in elections, didn't contribute much to my election, Fayette County Education Association supported me 01:28:00people-wise, they'd get out and walk the streets with me, and things like that. We'd have some knock-down drag-outs over that same issue, about how you pay, and the other issue I would go with is when we were in tight budget times, I said, rather than giving three percent across the board, let's give $1,000 across the board, because that's going to help the people on the lower rung more than it helps the people up high. And the folks down there in that office on Capitol Avenue didn't like that, because they were the ones at the top of the rung.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Were you able to get that passed?

MOLONEY: Couple times.

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: Couple times. Awful hard to get it to stick because the House Budget Comm----

[End of Tape 1, Side 1]

[Beginning of Tape 2, Side 1]

MOLONEY: Sometimes get that to stick, because the, the House Budget Subcommittee on Education was stacked in favor of KEA, you had three 01:29:00members on it who were married to members of KEA. So that kind of makes it a little tough to deal with.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: Kind of get personal.

MOYEN: Right, um-hm.

MOLONEY: And I knew that, and maybe that's why it was fun doing it.

MOYEN: Um-hm (Moloney laughs). Let's talk about the other major, major issue, especially with Appropriations and Revenue during the Collins term, as far as Toyota.

MOLONEY: She'll never get the credit she deserves for that. I mean, people have got to recognize what a great contribution that is to the Commonwealth of Kentucky. I want to say something to you. When she became governor, I think Governor Collins was very tentative at the beginning. By the time she reached her third and fourth years as governor, she was as impressive a human being I have ever seen sitting in that governor's chair. She knew more about what was going on, how 01:30:00to make it function, what needed to be done, than anybody I ever served under, and I mean anybody I ever served under. As much as Ford, and Ford I thought was the best I've seen. Collins, by the end of her term matched any of them, and the Toyota deal, I think, gave her so much confidence that she began to assert herself in all other areas. Toyota is a, the importance of that to this state is unbelievable. The last numbers I saw indicated the job impact is in the 80,000s, when you look all the way across the state of Kentucky, and it seemed like a, and like sixty counties, I may be wrong on my number there, but I mean it's everywhere, there's something, that they're building windshields, or they're building brakes, or they're building wheels, or they're building windshields, windshield wipers, something--

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: in some county, that come into this plant, and I think I read in 01:31:00the paper last week where they're getting ready to put a third line in?

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: I mean, it's, the impact is unbelievable.

MOYEN: Right.

MOLONEY: And you know, Governor Collins deserves a lot of credit for that.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Were you in favor of Toyota from the very beginning, or were you ever skeptical with the size of the--

MOLONEY: I wasn't concerned about it at all, because I mean Charlie Haywood told us on the Appropriations and Revenue Committee that he felt optimistically that we would repay that in ten years, and then he says, "And I may be wrong." Well, we repaid it in five.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: But I had no doubt in my mind it was going to work, none whatsoever.

MOYEN: Do you recall, were, the opposition from Toyota, did it come primarily over incentives packages, or was it also the old World War II, Japanese--

MOLONEY: Oh, the opposition was this fellow over here in Winchester, Wiggins, Don Wiggins, who basically is a nut, and he would get up there, and it was xenophobic, his opposition was purely xenophobic, and you know, it made no, no fiscal sense whatsoever to listen to what he was saying.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Although you supported that, at one point, I recall that you threatened to hold off on the budget until you got more information about the incentive package, do you recall that? MOLONEY: Um-hm. Yeah.

MOYEN: What information were you looking for, or was it any?

MOLONEY: Well I just, the package, it was pretty secretive when it first started going through, and I thought, you know, we're talking about some major dollars here, let's find out what's going on.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: And it was forthcoming. And when it came forth, so did the budget.

MOYEN: Uh-huh. Part of that, I believe the transportation cabinet 01:33:00awarded a couple of road contracts without going through the proper channels, and then Les Dawson referred to some of what was in the package as privileged information. Do you recall that?

MOLONEY: Not specifically. But I can imagine if he said that, it probably upset me.

MOYEN: Right. Yeah (both laugh).

MOLONEY: Because, when you're coming, when you're talking about spending public dollars, I don't think there's very much privileged information.

MOYEN: Right, uh-huh. Can you think of anything else, or nuances about the development of the Toyota legislation, the incentive package, that you wouldn't necessarily see in the paper, any, anything else about that?

MOLONEY: No, I don't really think so. I don't think so. Because once it became pretty obvious that it was going to be something that most people supported, the governor was very open about getting the information out and sharing it with people.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Okay. Now, during Collins's term, this is actually when your, if I, if I got this straight, your juvenile justice bill finally passes.

MOLONEY: Um-hm.

MOYEN: The paper said it had fifty-six drafts, fifty-six drafts.

MOLONEY: Could very well have.

MOYEN: Do you recall what that would be about? Why that effort was needed?

MOLONEY: You had a number of people involved in drafting and redrafting, changing. A court decision would come down sometimes from, a couple of Supreme Court cases came down during the period this was being drafted that changed some laws, that we have to go back and make those changes. New ideas would come in, we'd make those changes. Trying to get it together to where it was as strong as possible, and where it would work.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: And there were a lot of drafts, and we spent a lot of time working on that thing. It started here in Lexington, ended up, I think 01:35:00we did our final drafting down at Lake Cumberland State Park, down there in, about eight or ten of us got down there and just cranked it out for about a week to finish it.

MOYEN: Toward the end of Martha Lane Collins's term, there was a special session that dealt primarily with worker's compensation, I believe. You were stated as hoping that you could deal with some of the budget issues that Kentucky was facing at the time. Do you know if you were able to address any of those things?

MOLONEY: I don't believe we were able to because it wasn't in the call.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Would, how much of a role did worker's compensation play in revenue, either--

MOLONEY: Wouldn't play any. Wouldn't play any. The only way the worker's comp would play into revenue would be that liberalization of the benefits would increase legal fees, which would increase income tax 01:36:00receipts (laughs). That's the only way it would play in, because those funds would not be general fund dollars, except those things generated in that manner.

MOYEN: Okay. Do you recall much of the debate over worker's comp, and where different people aligned themselves on that issue?

MOLONEY: I really don't. I really don't.

MOYEN: Okay. I think it's, some of the concern was that a whole lot of businesses were paying for worker's comp, and--

MOLONEY: Well this was, wait a minute, wasn't that the one where we changed the thing where ever the special fund got out of, I think that's the one where the businesses stop paying into the special fund, we started making coal pay more into the special fund, that's the session I remember, yes, that's the issue there.

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: And we did end up doing that, shifting the burden on the special fund more to the coal industry, and away from general industry.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Did you feel like that was something that would still 01:37:00allow the appropriate monies to go to people who were suffering from black lung, or were you concerned if we shift this to coal, really these workers-- are going to be

MOLONEY: No, it continued to permit, the benefit level remained the same. The benefit level probably was too high, and in '96, after I left down there, when Patton called a special session, and cut benefit level back, he cut it too far. It's right ironic, because if I had been there in that '96 session, that bill would not have gotten out of committee in the form it was in, because I was on that committee, and I would have voted against it.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Did that, I mean, like you said you were not there at the time, but was that a shocker, that someone from Pike County--

MOLONEY: No. No, it wasn't, because the atmosphere was there to do it, and he got the Chamber of Commerce support, and the Republican support, 01:38:00and got it done. Went too far.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: Went too far.

MOYEN: Anything else about Martha Lane Collins's term that I'm missing that was an important dynamic in the Senate or with Appropriations and Revenue?

MOLONEY: Second time I went in the hospital with heart problems (laughs). Other than that, no (laughs).

MOYEN: I did read about that. What, would you blame that on genetics, or is there a stress level involved here?

MOLONEY: Stress. Stress. Both times I went. Totally stressed out. I mean, I went in, the first time I went in was during Brown's administration, I think it was '80, and I was having the contraction of the lower ventricles, which are not supposed to contract, it's supposed 01:39:00to stay steady, and I was drinking sixteen, eighteen cups of coffee a day, and I told the doctor that and he said, "Well, not anymore." But the next time, during the Collins administration, my blood pressure had just gone through the ceiling, 194/120. They took me to the hospital and knocked me out immediately, but bang, both times it was stress, but you know, I realize that, I changed the way I was living from the perspective that I wasn't going to let it get to me anymore. My blood pressure since that time has been, I just had a physical last week, it was 130/80, for a person my age, doctor says better than his, so you know (laughs), what the heck? You know. I'm a lot more relaxed, and the rest of my term down there after '84 when I had that second one, I just realized I'm not going to let myself get stressed out like this anymore.

MOYEN: Um-hm. And you were pretty successful at being able to keep to that promise?

MOLONEY: Yes.

MOYEN: Okay. Obviously the legislature has gained a great deal of independence. Martha Lane Collins, like you said, a strong governor this last session, but not strong like the type of governor we were talking about before.

MOLONEY: Didn't attempt, didn't attempt to. Didn't attempt to do that. She, she led by consensus.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: Wallace would have liked to have been that kind of governor.

MOYEN: Right.

MOLONEY: But he had so many, he'd made so many enemies in the legislature, there was no way he could do that.

MOYEN: Um-hm. And that's what I was getting to was when did you realize that Wallace Wilkinson in this race was going to be a force to be reckoned with?

MOLONEY: About two weeks before the election.

MOYEN: Okay. Who had you supported? MOLONEY: Brown.

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: We were doing tracking polls, and Wallace was moving like lightening.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: It was just a question of whether he was going to get there in time. And he did.

MOYEN: Was there any event that you recall was a turning point that 01:41:00really was what turned his, or essentially gave him--

MOLONEY: When he put that ad on television, he jumped up on that platform and said, "Are you for the lottery so you don't have to even pay for education," just as misrepresentation as he could be, which is a damned effective ad, that turned it. That turned it, right there. That started turning it, and the more he ran it, the quicker it turned.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: And I think John Y. thought he had it and didn't work very hard.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: Because he didn't work very hard.

MOYEN: Right (laughs). How did he deal with that loss? Did he--

MOLONEY: He just went on. You know, I think it hurt him, but he just went on, that's John Y. you know. He's been up and down several times.

MOYEN: Right. When Wallace Wilkinson comes into office, the Senate has a new leader, "Eck" Rose is there.

MOLONEY: Um-hm.

MOYEN: How did "Eck" Rose land his position of leadership? He really wasn't with the Black Sheep so to speak, he wasn't--

MOLONEY: Again, it was one of those situations where he's there, Joe Wright's leaving--well, Joe wasn't leaving yet, was he? No. Joe was still there. Who stepped down as President of the Senate and "Eck" moved in?

MOYEN: Was it Prather?

MOLONEY: Yeah, I think it was Prather.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: Joe, I mean, "Eck," "Eck" worked both sides well, got along with people, was able to broker deals on legislation, I think people had some kind of, had confidence in him as a result of that.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: And you know, I think that would be primarily, if I remember correctly, didn't he beat Benny Ray?

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: And Benny, who had been an ideal opponent for it.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: Because Benny got a little too cute sometimes on things, I love Benny, but he got too cute on things sometimes. Wouldn't always be upfront about what he was doing.

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: And "Eck" was pretty up front.

MOYEN: Um-hm. When did you realize that there was going to be a contentious relationship between Wilkinson and Rose, and Wilkinson and the Senate, and Wilkinson and you?

MOLONEY: The day he got elected. I mean, it was pretty hostile from the very beginning.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Was there ever really any thaw during his time?

MOLONEY: I think so. I think the thaw occurred when we were doing the education reform act. I'll never forget, we'd gotten governance taken care of, we'd gotten curriculum taken care of, and now we were going to be dealing with finances. And we had some folks on that 01:44:00conf--, in that room, like Pete Worthington who wasn't going to vote for any taxes for any reason. "We were going to do all this without money, we're going to do this with smoke and mirrors," and there were some others, and Wilkinson is sitting here, I'm sitting here, and Joe Clarke is sitting here, I lean over to Joe and I said, "Joe, I don't think I'm the one to make this suggestion, but why don't you make a suggestion that you and I, our budget staff, and governor's Office of Policy of Management people meet in private and come up with a finance proposal and bring it back to this group." And Joe sat there for a few minutes and made that proposal, and I think everybody in the room was so relieved to realize they weren't going to have to deal with it they said okay. Well we met, would be our budget staff, ----------(??) 01:45:00budget staff on education, and taxation. Bill Hence, Murlack(??), Bart(??), Ron Carson, the governor, he had Jack Foster in there, I don't know who else was there, Joe and I, and we met over in the dining room of the mansion for two, three days. And we finally hammered that package out, which included a tax increase. And I had alre--, I'd had a, I had appeared on the news program the week before that, and the issue was governor's tax proposal to extend the sales tax to services. I thought it was a hell of a good idea. Well, I get to WKYT for that 01:46:00news interview, their newsmaker, they're going to show it on the Sunday morning and tele--, and then film it Friday afternoon. There was a call waiting for me from Joe Wright, and he said, "Mike, I don't want you to get blindsided, we've just met with the governor, and the leadership has agreed to go for a six percent tax increase in lieu of an increase in expanding the sales tax to services, and governor's going to go along with that," and I said, "Joe, you're wrong." And he said, "Well, be that as it may, that was the vote, and I wanted you to be aware before you went on television." I said, hey, I appreciated the call, you know, that's why Joe Wright is the kind of person that Joe Wright is. That's what makes him that kind of person. I went on television, and they asked me, of course that had not broken yet, and they asked me about, you know, the two options out there, expanding the sales tax on services or going for the six percent, and I said, "You know, Governor Wilkinson's right, expanding the sales tax on services makes so much 01:47:00sense because that's going to give you an ever-increasing tax base as we need, every increase in revenue." Well, I didn't know it at the time, but sitting in the governor's office, sitting in the governor's home, or mansion, on a Sunday morning when they played this program was the governor and among others James Carville, and of course Carville, you know how irreverent he is, and they said, he said, they made that comment, and Carville with only that accent that he's got went, "That son of a bitch, I can't believe he actually is agreeing with you" (laughs). And, but Wilkinson was right on that, and I think me saying that enabled us to get through that session over in the mansion. But when we'd finished over there, and we'd agreed to raise this revenue at the level we'd agreed, and at the level that finally passed, it wasn't 01:48:00what passed the House, because there was a big difference between what passed the House and what passed the Senate, and I'll get to you on that, but we passed the House, we passed it, and everybody stood up and shook hands, and I walked over to Wallace, and you know, Wallace is about 5'9'', I'm a little, I'm about four, five inches taller than him, and I put my arm around his shoulder like that, and I thought Bill Hence was going to die, didn't know what I was getting ready to do, and I said, "God, ain't raising taxes fun, governor (both laugh)?" And he looked at me, and he had to start laughing, and we walked on, we walked on out, and I've got the photograph at home, we walked on down the driveway, and here's Wilkinson in the middle, Clarke on one side, and I'm on the other side, and we're talking back and forth, and they take this big picture and they show it in the paper the next day, and what we were talking about was me saying that to him, we were all kind of laughing, and I think most of the reporters were kind of shocked to see Wilkinson and I laughing at the same time. But you know, I think 01:49:00that thawed it a good bit. We still had some contention, but I ended up after he left office, he was on the board of the Lexington Center Corporation at the same time I was, and we got along fine.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: There were some differences there, but it was, you know, it was still there.

MOYEN: Did he ever talk to you about succession and how badly he wanted that?

MOLONEY: Um-hm, um-hm.

MOYEN: He threatened some others, did he ever threaten you with, if you--

MOLONEY: No.

MOYEN: opposed that he was going run someone against you.

MOLONEY: He did run someone against me.

MOYEN: It was him--

MOLONEY: He did run somebody against me.

MOYEN: That's right.

MOLONEY: Ran my sister against me.

MOYEN: That's right (laughs).

MOLONEY: He ran my sister against me.

MOYEN: (Laughing; unintelligible)

MOLONEY: But let me tell you, on the tax thing, the bill comes to the Senate, we haven't funded KERA, and it's a great, it's a great video, I have it at home somewhere, of that session, of writing up that bill in the Senate A&R Committee, and I look over to Don Judy who's sitting 01:50:00next to me, I said, "Don, give me that amendment." I said, "No, the big one." And the big one was where the Senate adopted an amendment by voice vote to eliminate the deductibility of federal income tax on state tax return, raising $250 million that year. That funded KERA. KERA was going to be underfunded unless that happened. That funded KERA. Means I've got to pay more taxes, but I'm willing to do it. But no, no '88, Wallace, Wallace got Mary to run against me, and then--

MOYEN: Did--

MOLONEY: his people bailed out on her.

MOYEN: Were you able to talk to her about that--

MOLONEY: No.

MOYEN: and say, because, you know in the paper she says, "Yeah, I talked to my family about it, and--"

MOLONEY: I wasn't part of the family she talked with about it.

MOYEN: Right (laughs).

MOLONEY: Nor was my sister Rose.

MOYEN: Okay. What was your thought when you first heard that she was 01:51:00going to run?

MOLONEY: Well--

MOYEN: Mary Moloney Mangione.

MOLONEY: Mary Moloney Mangione. I first heard she was going to run the day she filed. No one told me about it ahead of time, somebody, one of the reporters came up to me and said, "Did you know you got opposition this morning?" And I said, "No I didn't, who is it?" And they told me, and I just, "God, okay." Let's get to work. Let's get to work and win.

MOYEN: Uh-huh. What was your relationship with her? MOLONEY: Thought it, thought it was pretty good (laughs).

MOYEN: All right (laughs).

MOLONEY: Thought it was pretty good.

MOYEN: Has it been strained ever since, or--

MOLONEY: Yes.

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: I haven't seen Mary, but Mary's not in Lexington anymore, I don't know, so, I haven't seen her in quite some time.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Now, this was the election where you, I believe set a record for the time, raising money for a primary election.

MOLONEY: Yep.

MOYEN: Almost $100,000.

MOLONEY: I think it was over a hundred.

MOYEN: Over $100,000.

MOLONEY: I think.

MOYEN: And at least what I read, and managed to spend $87,000. Was this when you began to think there needs to be some campaign finance reform, or--

MOLONEY: Well, I think it may have crossed my mind then, I think when I really began to think that was during the Jones election, Jones campaign, but I mean, it's ridiculous to spend that kind of money for a state Senate race, but I had to spend it, because I, you know, I was looking at it from a perspective, and I was being told that Wallace is going to see to it that she's funded well. And I said, "Well, I'm going to make sure I'm funded well." And I was; and I was. I got to Jordan Child's people, and said, "What's it take to run?" They said a hundred grand, I said, "All right, I'll raise it." And it wasn't hard. In fact, it was too easy really. It was too easy. I mean, I had a 01:53:00lot of, I put a fundraiser on: boom, here it comes. But I'm just, then I'm receiving contributions from people I don't even know. Man called me and said, "Can I send you a contribution?" "Yes." "Okay, here." I think a lot of it was the fact that Wallace was running somebody, the perception was there that Wallace was running somebody against me, and I mean, some of his supporters did support Mary, some folks from outside the county. The Corrells down in Somerset gave her some money. Well, the next thing I knew, here came an envelope full of little checks totaling more than what the Corrells had given her from employees of Somerset Community College, who I had never solicited, didn't know any of them, and here's an envelope of checks, ten, fifteen dollars at a time. But you know, the Jones campaign is when I became convinced that something had to be done about campaign finance.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Can you tell me a little bit more about your campaign against Mangione.

MOLONEY: It wasn't my campaign against her, it was her campaign against me.

MOYEN: Right, but you (laughs)--

MOLONEY: It was my campaign for reelection.

MOYEN: Right, right.

MOLONEY: It was one in which we spent a lot of time, did a lot of direct mail, did a lot of very specialized mailings. For example, utilizing some people who were very knowledgeable in the area of computer science, I was able to generate a program whereby an employee, never a department chair, but an employee of every branch of the University of Kentucky down to maintenance and operations wrote a letter to somebody within that department urging them to support me.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: Pretty sophisticated mailings, and a lot of them. I mean, we 01:55:00inundated some areas of the county.

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: And then in the, again in the African American community, I think you can look at the results there, pretty heavy turnout, good organization and a lot of votes.

MOYEN: Do you recall what your margin of victory was? Either in percentage or--

MOLONEY: Right at sixty percent--

MOYEN: That's pretty decisive.

MOLONEY: Sixty, forty. That's--that, that wins elections.

MOYEN: Right.

MOLONEY: That wins elections.

MOYEN: And getting back to KERA, we started to touch on that, did you agree with the suit that was going through the courts, and when was that brought to your attention, that these lower courts were ruling in favor of these I think sixty-six counties.

MOLONEY: Oh, I mean, I testified. Joe Clarke and I both testified in the Franklin Circuit Court. We were asked about what is an efficient 01:56:00system of common schools, what does the word efficient mean? Haven't the slightest idea of what it means. Means whatever the court's going to say it means. Yeah, I was well aware of what the lower court was doing, and I think what Judge Corns did was set the stage ultimately for what the Supreme Court did, and I think what the Supreme Court did was exactly what needed to be done. I mean the most important, most compelling section of that entire opinion is where Justice Stevens wrote the entire system, teacher's retirement system, and named every branch of it, is gone unless the legislature redoes it in a manner that produces a financial system that's well done. You know when that came down, I mean, and you know, they said it's the legislature's responsibility to do it. The original draft of that opinion said it is the state's responsibility to see that that's done.

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: The re-draft said it's the legi--, would say, they went back on a motion to reconsider, and when it came back down it said it is the General Assembly's responsibility to do that.

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: And I think the General Assembly met its responsibility.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: Now, they haven't met their responsibility on a continuing basis, because they haven't provided the funding to make sure that the districts are equally, that funding across the districts is equalized.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: That's not occurring.

MOYEN: And why not?

MOLONEY: Money's not there. The money has not been continu--, the cost of providing that education has outstripped the amount of money that's been appropriated.

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: That's the reason you've got a new lawsuit filed.

MOYEN: Um-hm. When the decision, or when the opinion from the Supreme Court came down, did you feel like senators welcomed that, that that was going to give them the opportunity that they needed?

MOLONEY: I think a lot of people in the legislature saw that as the opportunity being presented to do it, do what needed to be done. And 01:58:00I remember we met shortly after that opinion came down, in fact it was when the first draft came down. When the opinion came down, and before the motion for reconsideration was filed, we met in Senator Rose's office, the Senate lea--, they elected Senate leaderships plus A&R and Education chairman, same counterparts in the House, and one of the most vocal people in that room about what this decision means, and that is that it gives the legislature the right to do something correct, and do it the way it ought to be done, was Don Blandford. Don saw this as an opportunity to take, to grab hold of it and run with it, and he did. I have a tremendous amount of admiration for him for the way he approached this. He just said, "All right, we're going to get it done." And he did. There was some reluctance on some other people in that room. But he took a strong position on it.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Can you tell me something about the property tax 01:59:00assessors, and in different counties, and some of the problems with that? MOLONEY: Well, where you need to go to get your history on that is the two major newspapers did their series, "Cheating our Children" and "Saving Our Schools." "Cheating our Children," I believe, was the Cou--, was the Herald's--maybe it was the other way around, one of them was the Herald and one of them was the Courier. And the "Cheating our Children" one was where it was showing the disparity on taxation, in other words, you'd see a picture of this house, ironically belonging to the property evaluation administrator valued at X number of dollars. And in another county, the same house valued at X-plus number of dollars. And that pointed out, and laid a great groundwork for what needed to be done, as did the other series, "Saving our Schools." And I can remember those, the anecdote, anecdotal information contained in 02:00:00those articles, and it created an atmosphere for doing something.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Is there ever a way to get school districts funded equally? Period?

MOLONEY: It's only going to be done with state support, and because you just do not have the ability for a Robertson County to generate the monies, the dollars per student that a Fayette County can generate dollars per student, as long as you use local property tax as a major component of that system, without having supplemental funding from the state, you've got to have, that's what, you know, that's what we tried to do. That's what the studies that our, the consultant that we used, John Augenblick was able to put together. We had a pretty good system there, but I believe that's, I think it's falling apart 02:01:00now, from what I can read in the papers. I haven't followed it in the legislature, but from what I read in the papers, the news stories, and looking at the various things that have come out, it looks to me like they're not funding it at the level they should be funding it, and it's equalization is where they're falling now.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Were there other problems besides these property tax issues that had to be dealt with before the system could really be changed in terms of--

MOLONEY: Big time in governance, big time in governance. The prohibition that was written into the law about the school boards hiring their relatives, the nepotism, there was a big issue. Big issue, particularly in the mountain counties. That had to be dealt with. You're not going to change anything until you deal with that. I remember we went to a conference in 1990 that the Education Commission of the state's put on in Seattle, and it was right after we passed this, and everybody out there wanted to know, you know, how did you 02:02:00do it and what's the impact been? And I made a comment, again, one of those comments that probably would have been better left unsaid, and said, "Well I, the question of whether or not this is going to be a success, I think has already been proven, we've already lost about 1/3 of our superintendents, all of about 1/3 of our superintendents have already resigned, because they realize they're not going to have the power they used to have." And that's a true, that's a true statement. When they lost the ability to hire and fire and designate principals and all that, I think a lot of them said, "Oh, well no sense in me sitting here taking this heat, I'm gone."

MOYEN: Uh-huh. Any, any problems, now looking back, that you could see with the legislation or the way it was funded that you think, as a whole, yes this is good, but--

MOLONEY: Still have problems in areas of testing, problems arise there from two areas, two perspectives that I see. One, the anti-reform 02:03:00people continue to point at testing: "Testing will never work, testing will never work, testing will never work." A lot of teachers don't like testing because it does measure what they're doing and what they're not doing. We're always going to have that criticism of it. The testing component needs to be strengthened, it needs to be done in such a way that we can tie teacher's compensation to knowledge gain. That hasn't been done, and it's going to be tough to do, probably damned near impossible to do given the power of KEA.

MOYEN: Anything else? MOLONEY: That's the major, that and funding it properly.

MOYEN: Um-hm. All right, let's talk about, before we get into Brereton Jones, we'd mentioned early the lottery and the way it was presented. What were some of the, the manipulations of the truth about what the 02:04:00lottery was going to do, about where the money from the lottery was going to go?

MOLONEY: Well, Wallace's campaign says it's going to go to education.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: I mean, his supporters today will tell you he didn't say that; he said it. That's fine. A lot of it is going to education. I mean, when you realize how much of our overall dollar goes to education, a lot of the lottery money goes to education. I think it's a mistake to earmark it. I think it's a mistake to earmark any money into any fund. I think you need it in the general fund and then allocate it according to the needs of the various programs, that's my own philosophy. And I think an awful lot of people felt, just going back to the, to the sales tax that Bert Combs put on, this is going for the veteran's bonus. Well, it wasn't going for the veteran's bonus, it was going to go fund government, just like the lottery proceeds were going to go fund government. Just like this expanding gambling they're talking 02:05:00about now, is going to go to fund the government. If you put it all into education, that means some of the general fund dollars that you're putting in education will go to the, going to be shifted somewhere else.

MOYEN: Right.

MOLONEY: But it was a sales, it was a sales gimmick, "Okay, here's a way we can take care of government without raising taxes."

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: And that's very popular.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Did the lottery ever come close to meeting expectations?

MOLONEY: The original projections, the original projections were high, higher than what has ever been realized, but not drastically, in my opinion. I think we, we, by the time we got through looking at the numbers, I think everybody realized where it was going to come in, and it's come in at about those areas. It's going to get impacted more and more as other states go to lottery. If Tennessee comes online, we're going to get hit again. We're going to lose some money.

MOYEN: There was a point where Wallace Wilkinson seemed to make it sound like he had earmarked the money for education, and that it was going into, almost what he called like a slush fund for legislators, I mean, do you recall that--

MOLONEY: Oh yeah.

MOYEN: And trying to clarify to people that--

MOLONEY: You couldn't. I mean, because it was popular to do it that way, because that way you're going to fund government without raising taxes, but you have to do what you have to do, and if it makes you unpopular, it makes you unpopular, that's the way it goes.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Tell me a little bit about, I believe it was during Wilkinson's tenure as governor where I think the senators chipped in, and did they buy you a round bed? Can you tell me about that story?

MOLONEY: Wallace had a, I don't remember what led up to it, but I 02:07:00had made, I think it was one of our budget projections where things were going to be pretty poor, in fact I'm sure it was, the headline, "Moloney projects such and such." And they asked Wallace about it in a press conference, and he probably just read the paper too, and he said, "Well, hell, Mike Moloney just gets up on the wrong side of the bed every day." And I took the floor that afternoon, that I'd heard what the governor said, and I'm aggrieved by it, and I took a coffee can and I'd wrapped a piece of paper around it and cut a slot on the top of it and put it on my, "Therefore, I'm putting this can up here on my desk, and I'm going to take up a collection for a round bed, anybody that wants to contribute they can." And laughed, sat back down, Wallace got mad about that, and they went and got me a big old pillow, a round pillow, blew it up and put it on the Senate floor, it's my round bed. 02:08:00Tried to get me to lay down in it, I wouldn't do that (laughs).

MOYEN: Anything--

MOLONEY: But you've got to have a little fun in that place down there. That's probably what's wrong with it down there right now, is everybody takes themselves too seriously.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Anything else about Wilkinson's term that sticks out in your mind, or Appropriations and Revenue, things that you're dealing with there that we've not touched on?

MOLONEY: No, not really.

MOYEN: When Brereton Jones is elected governor, does that change the tone for better or worse, either or?

MOLONEY: I think it changed the tone considerably. He was, obviously he was far more amiable that Wallace was as far as his relations with the legislature, but he sure, he quickly let them slide. He overreached on his health care bill and lost whatever momentum he had. We then tried 02:09:00to do the health care, I mean the finance, campaign finance reform. That's my position from him on it. Wasn't, he wasn't going to go along with it until we put a clause in it that said that the prohibition against raising money after an election would apply only prospectively and would not apply to people who had debt from prior elections.

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: And then when we put that in, he was for campaign finance reform, because he wanted to raise, he wanted to go back and recoup the money he'd spent for both lieutenant governor and governor.

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: But I think he probably hit the low point in his term when he vetoed the budget.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: That was very low. Very low for him. Very contentious.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: And then we had to, he ran into the shortfall situation. Marshall Long was chairman of A&R by that time, and I mentioned this 02:10:00earlier, he had us in and asked us if he would, if we would support his budget cuts, and support the fact that they needed to be done, and Marshall and I talked about it, and we had this informal consensus forecasting group in existence at that time, this was between Jones's first term and second term, and we said we would do that if he would agree to introduce legislation creating, statutorily, a consensus forecasting group.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: And he was advised not to do that by his people, because he said they thought he was being blackmailed, which he was. But he did it. And I think that improved that situation. But from the time he vetoed that budget, I think his, he kind of went downhill, as far as 02:11:00his relationship with the legislature is concerned.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Well tell me a little bit about the campaign finance reform and what you saw as the primary problems, and what you were able to accomplish?

MOLONEY: Well, the primary problems were the bundling of money from primarily engineers and contractors, engineers were the biggest group, architects and engineers, and it was paid back immediately with no bid contracts, and happened to cross the board, and I felt, and others who'd helped draft this thing, Joe Terry, a lawyer here in town, and Ray Wallace who was chairman of the Finance, of the Registry of Election Finance, felt that we could put a piece of legislation together that would utilize public dollars to partially fund campaigns, 02:12:00and would spend less money than what we're spending in repaying contributors with personal service contracts. And I think it's true that we could do, we did that. We did that. Has there continued to be abuses of personal service contracts? Yes. And does that need to be brought under control? Yes. But I think we'll be, we're better off with partial public financing, and I thought the system that we had was a pretty good system where, you know, you had to show your ability to have some broad based support by raising a certain level of money, and then we'll start giving you money.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: But obviously there were some folks that didn't want to do that. They couldn't defeat the bill, so they just de-funded it.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: They couldn't repeal it, let me say. So they just de-funded it.

MOYEN: Okay. What about health care? And what were the problems there 02:13:00that, I think it would be fair to say, haven't really been resolved from the health care. Well, before you answer that, let me flip this over.

MOLONEY: All right.

[End of Tape 2, Side 1]

[Beginning of Tape 2, Side 2]

MOYEN: All right.

MOLONEY: Jones's approach on health care probably was right, it was never fully explained, it was not thought through, and it did end up eliminating competition, which reduced you to the point where you have only a few companies in this state willing to write health care, and when you have that, then there is no competition on rates. And couple that with the rise in health care costs, and we've got a real problem, we've got a real problem. How do you get competition back in? I don't know that it's ever going to come back in, I don't know that it wants to come back in. They don't want rates reviewed. I think 02:14:00you get can get all the competition in the world back in here if you say, "Well, we're never going to check your rates as contrasted to what your payments are and see what the difference is. You can get all the companies in the world back in there, but as long as you're going to ask for rate review authority for the department of insurance, you're not going to get competition in health care.

MOYEN: Um-hm. I guess this is more conjecture, but I'm curious, are we going to, and this is more as a nation than a state, are we going to be able to solve health care problems, or is it--

MOLONEY: Not until we go to a national system.

MOYEN: Do you think we'll do that?

MOLONEY: And I don't know that we'll do that, but that's the only way you're going to end up solving it. There was an interesting article, or piece in the radio this morning, or yesterday afternoon, I'm sorry, talking about the UAW having finalized its contracts with the big three automakers, and the one thing that the president of the UAW said going 02:15:00into the negotiations with the big three was that health care is off the table, you don't touch it, it's going to remain like it is. And the commentator said, "Yeah, it's going to remain like it is until it gets to the point where it's so expensive that the government is going to have to start subsiding health care, just as they do in the other industrialized nations," and that's going to happen. Fourteen, fifteen percent increase in health care costs, inflationary increase cost of health care each year, that can't continue. That can't continue. And it's not being driven by lawsuits, it's being driven by a lot of things, including what can be charged, what folks can get away with charging.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Of course, the other big issue during Brereton Jones, not Brereton Jones himself, but during his time as governor is that BOPTROT 02:16:00scandal breaks.

MOLONEY: Right.

MOYEN: Tell me about what that was like, being in the Senate when that went down in, in '92?

MOLONEY: Well, it wasn't pleasant. Of course it happened, I don't remember the exact timing of it, but it seems like it was toward the end of the session.

MOYEN: Yeah.

MOLONEY: We were probably involved in budget negations at that time, so I, you know, here it came. It's probably sacrilegious to say this, given the fact that, quote, "BOPTROT," end of quote, was something that demonstrated how corrupt the legislature was. You know, that whole series started with the FBI coming in there trying to catch Wilkinson.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: And what they ended up doing was catching some folks that were getting free food delivered to their offices by lobbyists, or having 02:17:00money given to them to buy food for their offices by lobbyists. A good bit of it was overblown, that's my opinion.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: Wasn't pleasant. Wasn't pleasant being there, but you were there, you had your job to do, so you went on and did it.

MOYEN: Right. The Herald Leader said you were the first legislator to publicly say that you had suspected corruption, I believe.

MOLONEY: I don't remember it at all.

MOYEN: Do you recall saying that?

MOLONEY: I don't remember saying that.

MOYEN: Did you suspect that there were things going on, and would anyone suspect that?

MOLONEY: Well, there was a very cozy relationship between some lobbyists and some legislators. Now, what all that relationship involved, I 02:18:00don't know. Again, in the twenty-four plus years that I spent in Frankfort, I spent three nights there during the session. So, if you're not there, you don't see everything that's going on. I didn't go to the receptions, I just finished my work and came on home, because I still had a law practice that I was trying to keep alive so I could eat, and my family could eat. So you know it's not, I'm not saying I shut my eyes to things, I'm just saying I wasn't there, didn't stay there on purpose. I remember my dad, my dad never stayed down in Frankfort; he always came home.

MOYEN: Lobbyists take a lot of heat for playing a role in, you know, things in government that aren't necessarily appropriate. Are there 02:19:00things that lobbyists do very well?

MOLONEY: Yeah.

MOYEN: Is there, do they serve any noble purposes?

MOLONEY: You've got all kinds of lobbyists. You've got lobbyists that are down there that are there for no other reasons than to promote a very, very narrow agenda. You've got folks who are there, I'm thinking of like Debra Miller with Kentucky Youth Advocates, who are there promoting good causes. You've got folks that are down there with very selfish interests. My experience over the years with the lobbyists is that yeah there are some you can absolute totally trust, and there are some you can't. I can think back to a fellow by the name of Mack Morgan who was head of the Kentucky Retail Federation. Mack was generally, by virtue of where he's coming from with the Retail Federation, Kentucky Restaurant Association, not in favor of consumer legislation, but you could ask him point blank about, "Does this consumer legislation does 02:20:00it actually hurt your companies" And he'll look at you and grin and say, "Well, I've got to tell you it does, that's my job." But I think for the most part, the people that are there on a regular basis are respected, and they're honest, very few of them, I think, get, well, very few got involved in, in BOPTROT. It's a limited number that got involved there, and I think that was about the extent of it. I don't think you see the extent of it, not nearly the, there's too much money spent by them, but not nearly the extent of money that's being spent in Washington, and we have, with the campaign finance legislation, cut down on their ability to contribute to campaigns, which they haven't done in Washington, and that needed to be done.

MOYEN: Did you feel like the ethics legislation in the wake of BOPTROT, did it go too far as some--

MOLONEY: I don't think so.

MOYEN: You don't think so.

MOLONEY: I don't think so.

MOYEN: Now, obviously you served in the Senate and the House, they elected Joe Clarke as speaker, and he had been your counterpart in the Appropriations and Revenue. It probably is pertinent to say that he passed away just over a week ago. What was your working relationship with Joe Clarke like, or your friendship, either one.

MOLONEY: I think it was both. Joe would be called, let's say an issue would come up involving a budget, involving some aspect of government and financing thereof. The press would call him and ask him a question 02:22:00about it, and he'd give them an answer. They'd call me and ask me the same question, I'd give them the same answer. Joe and I hadn't talked. We were just, well, we worked together for so long, I think we knew how each other thought, and felt pretty much the same way about the issues.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: Joe was probably fiscally, a little more fiscally conservative than I was. I was willing at times to take some chances on some things, and he didn't like to, he liked to be more strict, I think that's probably his nature as contrasted to mine. But I mean we were, during the period of time we served as chair of A&R we were as close as, we'd be talking everyday during the legislative session, every week when we were not in session. That lessened when he became speaker, but we still became, still remained friends. I would see him when I'd 02:23:00go to Danville in connection with my law practice, we'd run into each other, see each other. He'd come over here, stop by, see me. But he was a special friend.

MOYEN: Um-hm. It wasn't too long after the scandals that took place that you announced that you weren't going to run again, I believe it was fall of '92, where you said that session would be your last.

MOLONEY: Actually what happened, I was in Louisville at a conference of the Kentucky Medical Association, and a doctor got up and we were talking about the health care legislation, specifically the provider tax, and he ranted and raved and said that we pass these things just so it could get us reelected, and we didn't care about the doctors, we 02:24:00didn't care about the hospitals, and sitting in the back of the room was Tony Gates, and Tony was the head lobbyist for the University of Kentucky who's also the vice president, assistant to the president at the medical center, and he's doing this, he's hiding his head, because this doctor happens to be on the staff at UK, and of course I, I pumped a bunch of money in there while I was (laughs), and Tony's rushing up to want to see me, and I said, "But doctor," I said, "it really doesn't make any difference," I said, "because I'm not doing this to seek reelection, because I've run all the elections I'm going to run, I'm through." That was when I said that I was not going to run again, and Tony stopped in his tracks and he says, "I hope you didn't mean what you said, and I hope it wasn't because of this idiot that works for us" (laughs). I said, "It's not because of the guy that works for you, but I did mean what I said, I'm through." I'd just, I'd had, I'd been there long enough. The single issue stuff was beginning to come in, 02:25:00the folks who had their issue, and if you did not agree with them on their issue, it didn't make any difference what you were interested in, whether it was passing the Lord's prayer, they were going to be against it. And the atmosphere changed, and I was just ready to go home.

MOYEN: Um-hm. So, was this pretty well thought out even though you said it came out on the spur of the moment there, you knew--

MOLONEY: Yeah, I knew.

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: I knew. I'd been there long enough.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Did that in any way change the dynamic of being a senator once you have said, "I'm not running again," does it give you more freedom, or--

MOLONEY: Didn't give me any more freedom, I felt I was pretty free anyway.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: You know, I mean I had, I had irritated enough people in the years I'd been down there to, you know, I was going to say what I felt like saying because it was what I believed in and whether it was popular or not, and so I, didn't give me any more freedom whatsoever.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Talk to me about a couple of these panels I believe that Brereton Jones had appointed you to serve on.

MOLONEY: Um-hm.

MOYEN: That, there were three of them, I think, that you--

MOLONEY: I resigned all three, and all three the same day.

MOYEN: Why was that? What had happened? MOLONEY: One of them was a panel on higher education, duplication and higher education, and when we sat down and talked about that, I said, "Now Governor, you want me to serve on this, I want you to understand one thing, this will not be used as a vehicle to close the University of Kentucky Dental School, will it? Because if you want me to endorse that, I'm not going to endorse it. It's a better dental school than what's at the University of Louisville, and you don't want to get into that direction." He said, "Absolutely, that won't occur." Well, we were scheduled to have one of those meetings of that panel that very afternoon up at Berry Hill mansion down in Frankfort. Stopped by Kevin Able's office that 02:27:00morning, "What's on the agenda this afternoon?" "Oh, just a general discussion." I said, "Do you have it printed up yet?" "No, I don't." We no sooner got in that meeting than he stood up and he started talking about closing the dental school at the University of Kentucky. I got up and walked out of the room, came back and sent him a letter resigning those three commissions, because I didn't want to serve on them if he was going to try to use it for his own agenda, I didn't want anything to do with it. And I would do everything I could, I felt if I stayed on the commission, and ended up adopting a report, and then it came to the legislature, I as a member of the commission would be somewhat compromised by fighting it.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: But not being a member of the commission, I wouldn't be compromised by fighting it at all. Ended up that the commissions didn't do anything.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Tell me a little bit about the type of challenges, we talked about your very first election, and concerns with UK, and 02:28:00keeping it essentially the flagship, I think is what we're saying, flagship university, and then you mentioned pumping money into the school and then resigning these, what do you feel like you, because you were in the Senate, you were able to help accomplish for UK?

MOLONEY: For UK?

MOYEN: Or for higher education.

MOLONEY: For higher education itself. The funding level being maintained at a level that will enable higher education to improve itself. I think during that period of time we kept the system of higher education together, a system which is now in the process of being balkanized with Eastern, and Western, and Morehead, and Murray, Northern Kentucky, and Louisville, all pulling out of, quote, "the system," notwithstanding the fact that we have this central board that's supposed to be 02:29:00governing, and it ain't working. You're seeing the balkanization of higher education since Patton reforms, in my opinion.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: And, but up to the time, as long as I was there, I think that we were able to keep it. I would have liked to have been there when they tried the so-called higher education reforms, because I would have, I don't know how successful I would have been, but I think I could have fought it pretty well. Because I don't think it's a reform, I think it's a, it's a restructuring. A restructuring that will lead us back as a state to where we were when Bob Martin, and Dero Downing, and Bob Sparks, and Adrian Doran would all come down to the legislature and demand what they could get for Eastern, Western, Murray, and Morehead, and everybody else was left to fight for themselves, and the 02:30:00Fayette County delegation would have to fight for the University of Kentucky, and the higher education system wasn't there. It got, it got back there, but I think it's in the process of disintegrating again.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Can you tell me what you think brought about the, a system that was working?

MOLONEY: Strong leadership at the University of Kentucky, and strong leadership in the legislature for, on behalf of the University of Kentucky.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: I think stripping the community colleges from the University of Kentucky has hurt, and will continue to hurt the University of Kentucky. Because I don't' think there's any ifs, ands, or buts about it.

MOYEN: In what ways?

MOLONEY: Statewide support for that system, for that University. The people where community colleges were felt a part, felt like they were a 02:31:00part of the University of Kentucky. They don't feel that now. They're part of this system that's there, this college, technical, and higher, which everybody praises, but I don't think that the feeling that they're part of the University of Kentucky is there. I know it's not there, and that's weakened UK.

MOYEN: Um-hm. What things were you able to do that helped strengthen UK?

MOLONEY: I think from the appropriation level, getting money to it when we could, making sure that its voice was heard, making sure that the community colleges were funded on a basis that would enable them to continue to function properly. I believe we were able to do that.

MOYEN: Can you think of any specific fights that you really had to--

MOLONEY: I tried to avoid fights on it. I just tried to get it done.

MOYEN: Um-hm, um-hm.

MOLONEY: And we could do that and get it done without fights.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Can you recall any instances of what you were talking about, specific incidences where the regional universities, like Murray and Morehead and Eastern and Western really were successful at nibbling away at what probably should be at the flagship?

MOLONEY: Oh I see it today. I'm not down there, I'm observing it from afar. I don't recall it during the period of time that I served in the legislature.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: I mean, I can, you know, before I got in the legislature, and this has nothing to do with me, we saw the University of Louisville brought into the state system, and Northern Kentucky University created into the state system. That nibbled away at UK from a funding base.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: We were able, I think, to put the funding base back together while continuing to fund those institutions, and the others, and bring 02:33:00UK back up, but at the present time, I see the funding base for the University dropping.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: And you know, there's a reason for it, and I'm not being critical of these people, but I mean the chairman of the Appropriations and Revenue committee in the House is an employee of Eastern Kentucky University. The Speaker of the House is formerly a teacher at Western Kentucky University and is empl--, lives in Bowling Green, and you can go on, and on, and on, and that happens. I was never an employee of the University of Kentucky, but I was a damn strong supporter of the University of Kentucky, and we had a lot of other people, and a lot of, Senator Pat McCuiston from down in Pembroke, way down in Western Kentucky, was a strong supporter of the University of Kentucky, you know why? Community college in his county. That's why. That kind of support's gone.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Let me ask you, after you decided to not run for 02:34:00reelection, the Herald Leader reported about payments you had received from Kentucky Central Life Insurance. Can you tell me about those? MOLONEY: I had a retainer with Kentucky Central Life Insurance, Mr. Kincaid put me on a retainer and asked me to be available to discuss with him issues that he wanted to discuss, mostly political, very few legal, he had plenty of good lawyers.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: That '90, that '79 campaign that I talked about, he was instrumental in me managing that campaign. He liked to dabble in politics. He liked to stay abreast of it. He wanted to know what was going on. We would meet, he would call you, ask you to come over and talk to him, and he'd want to talk about what's going on in politics, 02:35:00who's doing what, why, where, who's coming up, and all that kind of stuff. And he compensated people for doing that, and he paid me $400 a month for doing it. I probably spent a whole lot more than $400 worth of time doing it too. But I didn't mind. I didn't mind. A lot of people did not like Garvis Kincaid. Garvis was gruff to most people, to a lot of people, I would say. He did not suffer fools quietly. He was very kind to my father; he was very kind to me. I liked him, I enjoyed his company, and enjoyed talking to him, and those were some good afternoons. You'd get a call about 3:00 on Friday afternoon, "This is Kincaid. Can you come over?" I said, "Yes sir." Go over and sit around and talk. There were some interesting times.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: You know. Yes, I had the retainer, I was investigated by it, the federal government investigated me, found nothing to it. Now, they 02:36:00never said they found nothing to it, but they didn't investigate me, they quit, they advised, they advised my attorneys, I had an attorney, they advised my attorney that there was no investigation, nothing coming of the investigation.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Was that annoying when you see that in the paper, and you think, well, here was this deal we had set up, and it wasn't illegal, the investigation doesn't say anything, when they're investigating it, it shows up in the paper, when they decide not to, no one really knows that nothing is found, you know, that it's clear.

MOLONEY: That's--

MOYEN: in the clear.

MOLONEY: that's the way the United States Attorney's Office functions, I can't change that.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: That's the way the FBI functions, and I can't change that.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: I know I didn't do anything wrong, they know I didn't do anything wrong. I mean, I'm a public, I was a public official. If I had done anything wrong, they'd have got my ass, excuse my language, but they would have. But I didn't do anything wrong. I can, I'll tell 02:37:00you one story about that investigation. They wanted to meet with me, so I said, "I'll be glad to meet with you." This is the United States Attorney, and they had three, the United States Attorney and one, two, three of his assistants, a couple of FBI agents taking their copious notes. They, you know, it's amazing, unlike you using a recorder, the FBI doesn't use recorders, they don't have tape recorders, I guess they can't afford them, but then again, I also guess that if they had a tape recorder, you'd know what you actually said (Moyen laughs). And so would they. But this one assistant US attorney was questioning me about bills that I had voted for, at that point in time I had been in the legislature twenty plus years, voted for three, four, five hundred pieces of legislation per session, so I don't have a real good memory 02:38:00as to House numbers, I mean I remember House Bill 44, House Bill 910, which was education reform, I can remember some other numbers, and this assistant US Attorney asked me, said, "Now, you voted for Senate Bill such and such in 19--," whatever year it was. And I said, "Okay, if I did, I did." "Do you know that that bill granted a tax exemption, or granted an exemption from the insurance premium tax for the insurance policies sold to state employees." I said, "Okay, if you tell me it does that, do you have a copy of it?" And she said, "No, I don't." And I said, "Well, let's get a copy and let's look at it." The, the implication was I'm granting a favor to Kentucky Central by my vote. 02:39:00Well the bill passed 38 to nothing, and it applied to health insurance policies. Now, whether she didn't know that Kentucky Central didn't sell health insurance policies or not, I don't know. But that was the type of investigation that was being conducted, and they were going to nail me on that. So like I said, I didn't do anything wrong, if I had, they'd have done something to me.

MOYEN: Right, uh-huh.

MOLONEY: And I make no apologies for spending time with Mr. Kincaid, at his request, and providing him information that he wanted and being compensated for it.

MOYEN: When you decided to leave the legislature, you actually did that a little bit before your session, or before your term ended.

MOLONEY: I did.

MOYEN: Tell me about that.

MOLONEY: Well, it evolved around, revolved around a very important fact 02:40:00in my life, I got married, and moved from, and my wife and I bought a house that was not in my district, I had no choice (laughs). I had a choice, I had a choice, I could remain married to her and live in a separate house, or I could remain married to her and sell my house and live in the house with her. I made the second choice. At that point, I did not know a special session was coming up on worker's compensation. There was no inclination of that, no intimation of that at that point, but that's the reason I left.

MOYEN: Right.

MOLONEY: I got married on July 26, 1996, and I think I resigned at the end of July of '96.

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: Or maybe the first of August, but shortly after that.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Could you tell me a little bit about, before you left the Senate you were honored there, I believe, some of your children, or at 02:41:00least one of your children spoke.

MOLONEY: My daughter, well, they organized the thing, David Karem who was Senate majority leader, and his top aide, Mary Abrams, organized the little ceremony, in which they asked various members who I'd served with, and other people, to write letters to me, and they gave me a bound volume of it, and they started off by, the first letter was a letter from my daughter, Megan, who at that point in time was working in the White House, she was in the press office, President Clinton's press office, and she wrote a letter basically saying she knew about what was going on, and she wished she could be there, but she had a job to do in Washington, so she couldn't be there, but the rest of my family was there, and it was, it was very moving. Very moving.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Well, looking back on your time there, what would you 02:42:00say was your, your best vote, maybe your worst vote, and most difficult vote? Is anything come to mind? MOLONEY: I think my best vote (coughs)- -let me take this off and get some water.

[End of Tape 2, Side 2]

[Beginning of Tape 3, Side 1]

MOYEN: Okay.

MOLONEY: Well, thinking back, my best vote, I think from a historical perspective, would have to be on the education reform act, and the 02:43:00financing of it, not just the act itself, but being willing to finance it. Worst vote, hmm. Maybe it's one of those things you can't remember because you've put it out of your mind (laughs). I'm sure if I go back through the Kentucky acts over the years that I was there, there'd be some things I wished I hadn't voted for. I can't say what they would be right now. I don't know. The toughest vote I ever had was my first session. I was young, I was brand new, I had just come through a pretty tough election, I was serving at the time, as general 02:44:00counsel to the Kentucky Catholic Conference, which was the organization made up of the bishops in Kentucky, they basically set policy and made pronouncements. And this was in 1972, and one year after Roe v. Wade came down in 1971, there was a bill called to the date, January 22nd, a bill called to the floor to enact a statute of, that had been struck down by the Supreme Court of the United States in Roe v. Wade, an anti-abortion statute. As General Counsel to the Kentucky Catholic, no, as Assistant Commonwealth Attorney, I had defended the Kentucky 02:45:00anti-abortion statute in the United States District Court for Kentucky, Eastern District of Kentucky and won that case. It was appealed to the court of appeals in Cincinnati, argued that case. While we were waiting on a decision on that, the Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, struck down a Missouri Statute, which was identical to the Kentucky statute. Here comes a piece of legislation identical to what has been struck down. I received a call from a representative of the Kentucky Catholic Conference, not one of the bishops, advising me that I was expected to vote for that legislation. I knew the legislation was 02:46:00unconstitutional, I'd taken an oath to uphold the constitution, and I was one of three people to vote against it. That was the toughest vote. First of several on that same issue, because almost every session that issue has come back up and I have consistently voted that way. Now, should I have? I think I should have. It wasn't easy, there was a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure. Ironically, I get a call the next day, it was an emotional vote for me, I got a call the next day from one of the bishops, and he told me not to worry about it. I told him I felt I should resign as general council, and did. But he told me not to worry about my vote, that I did what I would, I did what I 02:47:00thought was right, and that he understood it completely. Didn't make the vote the day before any easier, but that had to be the toughest vote I had. The first time; after that, it wasn't hard. I don't like the idea of abortion, but I recognize what the courts have said.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Let me ask you about one, in general, how would you say the legislature has evolved? MOLONEY: Well, it has evolved from an entity in the '50s, '60s, '70s, that was totally subjective, totally a subject of the executive.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: And I can talk about '50s, '60s, and '70s because I either read about those or participated in them, or was old enough to understand it. To a point today, where I think it has degenerated into a entity that is incapable of making policy, because of the one issue people, and because of petty little bickering, and partisan bickering. That's today, as we sit here, this is 2003.

MOYEN: Um-hm.

MOLONEY: Any solutions you see on the horizon that will help that?

MOYEN: The election of people who recognize that their responsibility is to the state of Kentucky, not to themselves, not to just their 02:49:00constituents, not to just that interest group that supported them, but to the entire state. And if that means that they have to cast a vote that's unpopular and possibly get beat, that means they have to cast a vote that's unpopular and possibly get beat. The fellow who said it best, and I can only paraphrase him, was Edmund Burke. He said if a representative, excuse me, a representative owes to his constituents his loyalty, his hard work, and his integrity; but if he forfeits to them his intelligence, and his independence, he serves them poorly. Now that's a paraphrase; he said it a lot better than I did. But that's 02:50:00the, that's what it's going to take to restore the Kentucky legislature to the position where it can do something, and that is that folks have got to get elected who recognize that their responsibility is to the state as a whole, and to its people, rather than the narrow interests.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Do you think that any of that has to do with, much like, historically, the Democratic Party in Kentucky, when you are firmly in power, you start to see the fissures or the factions, because you are in control. Do you think that it would be wrong to say that some of this is because the legislature has gained so much power comparatively speaking, or is that not really an issue? Does that make sense?

MOLONEY: I think it makes sense from the perspective that it probably relates to the legislature overstepping its bounds, as I was mentioning 02:51:00earlier about the administrative regulations. I think they've gone too far in that area, they see this as an opportunity to exercise more power than they really have, and they're enjoying it, and they ought not be doing it.

MOYEN: Um-hm. Was there anything that was valuable that we've lost? I mean, a lot of the things, you have to say, "Yes, this had to happen," but was there anything that was valuable that we lost about, I guess what you could call old-time Kentucky politics that is missed? I mean, obviously the pay-offs, and so obviously that stuff's got to go, but--

MOLONEY: Loyalty. Loyalty to your political party doesn't exist. Doesn't exist. Political parties don't exist. It's all personality, 02:52:00cult of personality.

MOYEN: Um-hm. When I was trying to research for this, I read stuff about the round bed, I believe you took a pretty good ribbing about your engagement, and that you were actually smiling some.

MOLONEY: No question about it.

MOYEN: (Laughs), are there any other stories that you have that weren't, that wouldn't make it into the paper, per se, and they may seem anecdotal, but when put in context may be valuable to understanding, or gaining insight about the legislature, or the personalities there? MOLONEY: I can't really think of any.

MOYEN: What else have I missed? MOLONEY: You've been pretty thorough.

MOYEN: Anything else that you would like to add?

MOLONEY: No, I appreciate the opportunity to share this time with you; 02:53:00it's something that I've enjoyed doing.

MOYEN: Well, thank you for meeting with me.

MOLONEY: Okay. Thank you.

[End of interview]